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By Root 750 0

could have hoped for. In travelling from Venice to the baths in Lucca and then on to Florence, he and Lucia had moved from one Habsburg dominion to another—Archduke Ferdinand being Emperor Francis’s younger brother. But unlike the rest of northern and central Italy, Tuscany had remained fairly untouched by Bonaparte’s invading armies and the strife that had come in their wake. “One enjoys perfect tranquillity here [in Florence],” Lucia wrote to her sister, longing for news of the colonel. “The people seem delighted with their government and the Archduke is universally esteemed.” The inn where they had settled was entirely satisfying: “We have an excellent cook, proper bathrooms and even carriage service.”3 From her room at the Corte d’Inghilterra, she had a full view of the Arno, with the Ponte Vecchio further downstream and olive groves shimmering on the other side of the river, up to the Belvedere.

Alvise and Lucia fell into an easy routine, visiting picture galleries and calling on Florentine friends from their youth. They watched the picturesque boat races down the Arno, which seemed quaint affairs in comparison to the magnificent Venetian regattas down the Grand Canal. “Four little vessels and a rather thin show…”4 Lucia commented. There was something endearingly passé in the way the Florentine ladies liked to dress “three years behind everyone else.” Some of the clothes she had brought down from Venice were frowned upon as being “excessively jacobinesque”—especially the airy, Grecian-style tunics which became fashionable in Paris during the Directoire, and which Lucia had occasionally worn during the French occupation.

Life was slow yet the atmosphere was cosmopolitan. Florence was a haven for Italian families escaping from either the French or the Austrians. Arch-conservative Roman aristocrats mixed with Bonapartist democrats. The most prominent refugee was Pope Pius VI, who had been run out of Rome by French troops a few months earlier, and was living temporarily in the charter-house overlooking the city. Lucia remembered the elderly pontiff with affection from her Roman days, when he had confirmed her and Paolina in Saint Peter’s basilica, and she made a special effort to seek him out. “He lives in the most unhappy state, sustained only by his faith and his courage,”5 she reported to her sister. But he had brightened up at the memory of his good friend Memmo and was curious to know “how the two of us have done in the world.”

Lucia had an ulterior motive in seeking out Pius VI. The convent of Celestia, in Venice, where she and her sister had lived during their childhood after their mother’s death and again, later on, as they waited for their marriage contracts to go through, was now off-limits to them as a result of the restrictive policies adopted by the local religious authorities after the arrival of the Austrians. In the face of unceasing turmoil, Lucia was not prepared to lose touch with the one place that had always offered her safe haven. She appealed to the Pope for a special permission to visit the enclosed nuns, and was relieved when he granted a written authorisation to enter the convent once a week. “The permission is for both of us,” she informed Paolina. “I couldn’t wait to tell you. It has given me such comfort.”6

The lazy Florentine summer came alive in early August with the stunning news that Lord Nelson had sunk Bonaparte’s fleet off the coast of Egypt. After his triumphant Italian campaign, Bonaparte had returned to Paris planning to invade England but had shelved the idea after taking a disparaging close look at the French fleet assembled in the Channel. Instead, he had decided to weaken England by conquering Egypt and threatening the route to India. Soon after his first, successful landing, lack of food and the hostility of the local population had convinced him to set sail again in search of a safer harbour. Lord Nelson had intercepted Bonaparte’s dispatch to the Directoire with his new plans. On 1 August he had come upon the French squadron at Aboukir and destroyed it.

It was hard to