• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 752 0

to her sister that she had never seen her husband work so tirelessly at improving the estate. During the summer he drew up a new investment plan to reclaim more land and accelerate the pace of cultivation, he oversaw construction of more housing units for the workers, he started building a school for the growing number of children living on the property and he approved the drawings for the town church. Meanwhile, work on the main house proceeded speedily, and plans were now laid for a large park that was to extend from the fruit orchards behind the villa all the way to the small river that formed the eastern boundary of the property. Molinato was no longer just a big farming estate. It was growing into something different from anything Lucia had ever seen: a large, self-sufficient community centred around a functional, well-organised small town. For the first time she wondered whether Alvise’s dedication to his ambitious project was not also related to the precariousness of the world beyond it.

Bonaparte, meanwhile, consolidated his position in northern Italy. In rapid succession he deposed the Duke of Modena, Hercules III, occupied the Duchy of Reggio and formed a confederation of these two cities with Ferrara and Bologna, thus creating a French-controlled puppet state on the southern border of the Venetian Republic. His troops then marched on towards Rome and frightened Pope Pius VI into signing a peace treaty in which he agreed to yield cash, provisions and one hundred works of art from the Vatican collection. In the late summer and early autumn Bonaparte fought back a fresh Austrian offensive in Lombardy, gaining victories at Castiglione, Arcole and Rivoli. The fortress of Mantua, Austria’s last bastion in northern Italy, fell in February 1797.

As it happened, Alvise was appointed governor of Udine, the capital of Friuli—the same region in the north-east of the Republic which Bonaparte chose as the staging ground for his final offensive into Austria. As Alvise and Lucia settled into their new quarters, some 70,000 French soldiers marched through town on their way towards the Austrian border. Bonaparte faced a well-entrenched, highly trained army of 100,000 men under the command of Archduke Charles, the emperor’s twenty-five-year-old brother. Charles had already defeated the French army on the Rhine a year earlier; now he planned to wrest the rich plains of Lombardy from Bonaparte and bring them back into the Habsburg fold. But in March 1797, Bonaparte crossed the river Tagliamento and took the fortified city of Palmanova. He moved quickly to the north-east, overpowering the Austrian defences and seizing the city of Gorizia. Next, he crossed the Julian Alps at Tarvisio, descended on the Austrian town of Villach and moved on to Klagenfurt and then Graz, where he set up his headquarters. It was an extraordinary run by any measure. In less than three weeks Bonaparte had crushed Charles’s well-trained army and taken his troops within a hundred miles of Vienna.

“Limitless luck is surely the guiding star of this French army,” Alvise burst out in near disbelief.5 But a more complicated picture emerged from his conversations with French officers riding in and out of Udine. Bonaparte was tempted to advance all the way to Vienna, but he was deep into hostile territory and stretched very thin. If the local peasantry turned against him, he would be forced to retreat, exposing his men to a furious Austrian counter-attack in northern Italy, with anti-French riots breaking out in the Venetian Republic and perhaps even in Lombardy. “So far his good fortune has exceeded his own expectation,” Alvise reported back to the Senate, “but I am told he is hearing many complaints from his soldiers and some of his most trusted generals about the excessive risk of moving deeper into a country where not enough is known of the territory, the language, the people.” Bonaparte’s brilliant Italian campaign could yet turn into a nightmare and Alvise was hearing that the politicians in Paris were grumbling. “The star of this young general is dimming