In 1797, Lucia, the beautiful sixteen-year-old daughter of a Venetian statesman, was married off to Alvise Mocenigo, scion of one of the wealthiest and most powerful families of the once glorious maritime Republic. They were a golden couple in Venice's twilight years. But Lucia's life was suddenly transformed when the thousand-year-old Serenissima collapsed under the blows of young Bonaparte in 1797. Whether as a dazzling young hostess in Habsburg Vienna, lady-in-waiting at the court of Prince Eugene de Beauharnais in Milan, single mother in Paris during the fall of Napoleon's Empire or as Byron's hard-fisted landlady during the poet's stay in Venice, Lucia lived to be a remarkable witness to an age of great turmoil. Two hundred years later, Andrea di Robilant, Lucia's great-great-great-great grandson, has unearthed letters and diaries in archives across Europe to draw an intimate and vivid portrait of his ancestor, and of the exceptional times she lived in.
