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By Root 855 0

and were renovated many times. As a result, the various facades formed a disharmonious but impressive whole that reflected the family’s steady accretion of money and power over the course of six centuries. It was an intimidating world for a seventeen-year-old bride to enter, filled as it was with the mementoes of a rich and often glorious history. The Mocenigos had given seven doges to the Republic, and Mocenigo admirals and diplomats had helped to expand and protect the Venetian Empire. Room after room was filled with venerable trophies: a picture of a famous battle scene, a corno dogale (doge’s cap) under a glass casing, the rusty scimitars wrested from the Turks. In the years of Venice’s decline, the Mocenigos were among the few great families that had managed, through marriages of convenience and land acquisitions on the mainland, to hold on to their fortune and actually increase it. By the end of the eighteenth century they owned immense estates in the provinces of Padua, Rovigo, Verona and in the northern region of Friuli. Their yearly income was well over 100,000 ducats, making them one of the five richest families in Venice.

The aggregate wealth of the 200 or so families inscribed in the Golden Book of the Venetian patriciate, on the other hand, had suffered steady erosion. Many of these nobili, or patricians, were so impoverished that they had long ago lost their palaces, and were housed and fed in special wards funded by the government. By the 1780s the oligarchy which had ruled Venice for nearly a thousand years had become ossified and terribly in-bred, too weak and brittle to face the powerful winds of change that were gathering force in France and would soon bring down the Republic of Saint Mark. In the early 1760s there had been a timid attempt at reform, aimed at broadening the base of political power to make the system more democratic, but the dominant conservative families had been quick to quash it. Instead of allowing new blood and energy to breathe life into its decrepit body, the oligarchy chose to remain a closed, withered caste. A few wealthy families continued to ensure their pre-eminence through patronage, corruption and inter-marriage. And the Mocenigos were certainly among them—of their seven doges, three were elected in the eighteenth century.

Alvise and Lucia’s apartment at Palazzo Mocenigo was on the mezzanine floor and looked directly out on the Grand Canal. It was spacious and elegantly furnished, with sunlight streaming in from the large windows over the water. There was a bedroom, a library-studio, a drawing room, a dining room and a small study adjoining the bedroom where Lucia could write and paint and take lessons—Alvise had granted her special request. The chambermaid, Maria, and the rest of the small staff lived in the servants’ quarters in the back. The apartment was quite independent from the rest of the house, a safe harbour, as it were, in the much vaster universe of Palazzo Mocenigo, with its grand staircases, its endless halls, its numerous apartments distributed on four floors where a crowd of Mocenigo relatives lived on more or less friendly terms.

It is easy to see how Lucia could feel lost in those new surroundings. She had hoped Alvise would be her guide and protector, but he was seldom at her side, always rushing to a function, a business meeting and other, more mysterious encounters. His elusiveness unsettled her from the very start of their marriage. The letters and notes she wrote to him those first few weeks of their life together are those of a very young wife in love with her husband, who wants to make him happy more than anything else in the world, and yet struggles to find her right place in his life. “My most beloved Alvise, it seemed to me you were not in your usual sweet humour when you woke up,” she wrote to him one morning. “I am a little worried as I am unable to trace the cause of this change.” She felt observed by the family yet also isolated, and she spent a good portion of the day wandering through the palazzo in the hope of suddenly coming upon Alvise,