We specialize in hard to find items
All Categories
A Venetian Affair: A True Tale of Forbidden Love in the 18th Century
Share Tweet
*Price and Stocks may change without prior notice
*Packaging of actual item may differ from photo shown
- Electrical items MAY be 110 volts.
- 7 Day Return Policy
- All products are genuine and original
About A Venetian Affair: A True Tale Of Forbidden Love In
Product Description In the waning days of Venice’s glory in the mid-1700s, Andrea Memmo was scion to one the city’s oldest patrician families. At the age of twenty-four he fell passionately in love with sixteen-year-old Giustiniana Wynne, the beautiful, illegitimate daughter of a Venetian mother and British father. Because of their dramatically different positions in society, they could not marry. And Giustiniana’s mother, afraid that an affair would ruin her daughter’s chances to form a more suitable union, forbade them to see each other. Her prohibition only fueled their desire and so began their torrid, secret seven-year-affair, enlisting the aid of a few intimates and servants (willing to risk their own positions) to shuttle love letters back and forth and to help facilitate their clandestine meetings. Eventually, Giustiniana found herself pregnant and she turned for help to the infamous Casanova–himself infatuated with her. Two and half centuries later, the unbelievable story of this star-crossed couple is told in a breathtaking narrative, re-created in part from the passionate, clandestine letters Andrea and Giustiniana wrote to each other. Review "Splendidly engrossing. . . . An extraordinary story." -- The New York Times Book Review “Jane Austen herself could not have conjured a romance with more passion, deception and intrigue.”-- People “Thoroughly fascinating. . . . Has all the hallmarks of a Henry James novel. . . . Interweaving dramatic scenes and keenly observed expository passages [di Robilant] creates a narrative of novelistic resonance.” -- The Washington Post Book World“A story of Venice at at time when people lived for romantic intrigue and where social and political restrictions led men and women into liaisons that made for delicious, tormented melodrama.” - -Salon“Filled with quiet intensity and elegant, thought-provoking prose…An elegiac and powerful novel with a fresh presentation of evil and the healing potential of forgiveness.” -- People From the Inside Flap "Some years ago, my father came home with a carton of old letters that time and humidity had compacted into wads of barely legible paper," Andrea di Robilant tells us as he begins this spellbinding true story of love in eighteenth-century Venice. In the attic of their old family palazzo on the Grand Canal, his father had found the love letters of their ancestor Andrea Memmo, one of the last great Venetian statesmen, to a beautiful half-English girl named Giustiniana Wynne. Some of the letters were written in code, which di Robilant and his father cracked to reveal an illicit passion: Giustiniana was not of the elite ruling class and would never have been considered a suitable match for Andrea. But their acts of devotion were startlingly brazen. As their courtship unfolds, they plot elaborate marriage schemes that offend everyone, arrange secret trysts in borrowed rooms, cause trouble for the servants who must ferry their forbidden correspondence, and even weather an unwanted pregnancy, from which Giustiniana, with her wits and ingenuity and some crucial assistance from the infamous Casanova, emerges unscathed. Andrea di Robilant, heir to the lovers' legacy, captures them in the twilight of the golden era of Venice, with forays to the colorful social circles of London and Paris along the way. His sparkling, well-paced narrative evokes the world of mask-wearing men and ladies attending Goldoni plays and gambling at the Ridotto—bringing to life, 250 years later, a tale of unbounded passion and rich historical intrigue. From the Hardcover edition. From the Back Cover In the waning days of Venice's glory in the mid-1700s, Andrea Memmo was scion to one the city's oldest patrician families. At the age of twenty-four he fell passionately in love with sixteen-year-old Giustiniana Wynne, the beautiful, illegitimate daughter of a Venetian mother and British father. Because of their dramatically different positions in society, they could not
