Lucia - Andrea Di Robilant [21]
The difficulties came, as always, from Alvise’s father, the moody, unpredictable Sebastiano, who suddenly refused to give the marriage his final blessing after promising he would. Memmo guessed this new delay had something to do with the fact that Giovanni Mocenigo, Sebastiano’s older brother, was very ill: after his death, Sebastiano would become the titular head of the Mocenigo family, and would therefore be able to put a personal stamp on the marriage contract.
Weeks passed with no final settlement in sight. Memmo waited “philosophically,” as he liked to put it. Alvise stopped by the convent in between sessions of the Senate and business meetings for visits that always seemed too short to Lucia. She reprimanded him gently “for those brief minutes you spend with me that do not satisfy me.” He was often distracted, in a hurry to leave, and though she understood he was a busy man with increasing responsibilities, she found his “indifference” wounding. “I have wanted to complain about this to you,” she confessed in a note she slipped to him through the grid, “[but] when I see you, my heart is overcome by such turmoil that I grow ever more desperate.” She feared Alvise’s comings and goings might be a foretaste of their future life together. “For pity’s sake,” she begged him, “allow me to spend as much time as possible with you in the future and to always accompany you on your trips.”2 Alvise sent her magnificent clothes, bouquets of fresh flowers, baskets of fruit and silver cups brimming with delicious ice creams, but as much as she appreciated these gifts, they did little to assuage her anxiety.
Giovanni Mocenigo died at the end of February 1787. As Memmo had predicted, Sebastiano, now the head of the family, announced he was removing his last reservations. At his insistence, however, a new contract was drawn up and Memmo had to agree to pay Alvise a monthly stipend until he inherited the Mocenigo fortune upon Sebastiano’s death. The contract was signed at the end of March, a few days before Lucia’s seventeenth birthday. In mid April the dressmakers made their first appearance at Celestia and a festive atmosphere filled the convent. Lucia’s residual reserve dissolved completely. “How strongly I wish to tie the knot that will join me to my adorable husband and allow me at last to tell him ‘I love you’ again and again,” she wrote to Alvise, beaming with anticipation.3
On a sunny morning in early May, five months after entering the convent, she bid farewell to the nuns, and stepped into the bridal gondola in the full regalia of a splendid Venetian bride, her silk dress studded with gems and lined with tiny white pearls. The wedding cortège glided slowly up the Grand Canal, spawning a long swath of colourful boats of different sizes. Along the waterway, the crowd clapped and cheered—Evviva la sposa! Evviva la sposa! (Long live the bride!)—while loaves of bread and flasks of wine from the hills of Friuli were handed out to the populace. The parade passed beneath Palazzo Mocenigo, decked out with banners flying the family crest—two roses against a white and blue background—then moved upstream past the Rialto bridge, to the old church of San Marcuola, in the square adjacent to Ca’ Memmo, where Alvise and Lucia were married. After the ceremony, Memmo hosted a lavish banquet at which the newly-weds were toasted with poems and accolades. As the feast wore on, he rejoiced at the success of his tenacious diplomacy. “There is no more perfect marriage,” he proclaimed, “than the one between my daughter and Alvise Mocenigo.”4 Alvise led his bride on to the master gondola of Ca’ Mocenigo and together they glided back down the Grand Canal to their new home.
Palazzo Mocenigo was made up of three connected palaces facing south at the point where the Grand Canal begins its final turn before heading towards the Basin of Saint Mark. The palaces were built in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, during the heyday of the Republic,