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By Root 901 0

sheer number of people pressing against each other, inspired universal silence, and I let myself be carried by the flow until I was seized by nervous giggles. My uncontrolled laughter was all one heard in that gloomy underworld. Luckily we came to a resting area, with water games and lighting effects produced by artificial fissures in the rocks. Musicians played wind instruments behind a veil of cascading water. Further down the passageway, rest rooms were carved into the limestone and illuminated by lamps of alabaster. The rest rooms were equipped to service twenty-four people of both sexes—here gentlemen and ladies use the same facilities. We continued our journey to the Temple of the Night and were soon enveloped by total darkness, an effect meant to enhance the contrast as we finally reached the temple itself. The building is formed by a circle of columns, sustaining an upper balustrade decorated with cupids. Alabaster lamps in the shape of pyramids illuminate the vaulted ceiling: a deep blue sky, with twinkling stars and a shiny moon. At one side stands a large crater, the Vase of Destiny. It is said that the vase glows in a particular way depending whether the answer to whatever thought is on your mind is yes or no. At the other side is the Book of Destiny, where those who want to question the vase must put down their name. Then a series of mysterious symbols on the ground lead one to the centre of the temple, where the Goddess of the Night stands on her chariot. I’ve never seen anything in such bad taste as that paltry wax statue being pulled by those scrawny little horses. Baron de Brown [sic] should have commissioned a better artist to do the work—Canova would have done a fine job. For a moment I was tempted to let the Vase of Destiny know what I thought about the Goddess of the Night. I caught myself just in time…8

Lucia emerged from that bizarre netherworld in a daze, and walked up to the main pond. She saw the villa standing on the other side of the water and headed towards it when she suddenly stopped in her tracks: tethered to the mooring near the house, a sleek Venetian gondola slapped and sloshed in the afternoon breeze. What was it doing there? Was this a dream or one of Baron de Braun’s fabulous stage tricks? Eventually, a rational explanation formed in her head: the gondola had probably been brought from Venice as a decoration, like the Ottoman caiques ferrying the visitors across the ponds. Yet for a long while she could not take her eyes away from that awkward trophy moored, a bit like herself, in waters so far away from home.

That evening, writing to Paolina about her day at Schonau, Lucia dwelt on the strangeness of that moment. For it was not a rudimentary Austrian version of a gondola, she insisted, but “an exact copy of the ones we have back at home.” Perhaps for that reason it had taken her so long “to let go of the illusion that I was in a familiar place with you; not in Venice of course, because of the bucolic surroundings, but perhaps somewhere along the Brenta canal.”9 She missed Paolina terribly, and told her how sorry she was to have deceived her the night before her departure. “If I had given in to my feelings and had hugged you tight, you would have guessed the truth,” she wrote tenderly. “The coldness I forced myself to display, and which I was so far from feeling, is the true measure of how hard it was for me to leave you.”10

From the beginning of their stay in Austria, it was clear to Lucia that Alvise had no intention of spending more time in Vienna than was strictly necessary. Indeed, his plan was to travel back and forth between Italy and Austria, but Molinato would continue to absorb most of his energies. Lucia, on the other hand, was to stay in Vienna, set up house with the help of her maid, Margherita, and lay the groundwork for their entrance in society. At the end of September, Alvise took a five-year lease on a pleasant apartment off Saint Stephen’s Square, with tall windows and a side view of the cathedral. It was not a grand or showy set-up, but it was elegant and