Memories of the Venetian palace where I lived
The story of the landlady who rented the Palazzo Mocenigo to Byron stirs Robin Lee's recollections of a place populated by brilliant decadent ghosts of an astonishing past here are cities that mark a definite stage in life's development. For no reason that the mind can immediately follow, they absorb and localise the workings of the imagination: till the outlines of their rooftops, the colour and configuration of their walls, the changing yet recurrent pattern of odours and street-noises, and most of all the quality of the light that clothes them, damp and concealing or sharp and crystalclear, become associated with the mood and emotions of a particular period. Such on Byron was the effect produced by Venice. Weary of travel and sick of sightseeing, he left the mainland, and was ferried out from Mestre across the torpid lagoon and opened his eyes, pleased and bewildered, to a new experience.'
Peter Quennell, the biographer and literary historian, describes what I also experienced. From 1999 to 2001, almost two years, like Byron, I was a tenant in the same palace he lived in, Palazzo Mocenigo. A fascinating new book, Lucia in the Age of Napoleon by Andrea di Robilant, tells the story of the landlady who rented the house to Byron. It is a different story from Byron's and other visitors', many of whom have written about it. This is a Venetian point of view, a rare one, from the inside, the very heart of Venice. Rats, rent disputes, breakages . . . Some things never change, especially not in Venice.
Our apartment was on the top two floors. In square metres (not to mention cubic metres, which would give a better idea of the contrast) it was roughly triple the size of our house in London, in Ovington Square, that we had rented out to an American banker for about quadruple what we were paying in rent at Mocenigo. My landlady was 22 years old. Like Lucia she had inherited vast agricultural estates on the mainland. Her father had died when she was a child and her mother had died only recently from a mysterious disease which had caused her to bloat to an enormous size. It was said she died trying on a pair of shoes. The girl was blonde and pretty, but she had a disconcerting habit of sucking her thumb. She hated Venice and never came there; her only interest was horses. All her affairs were managed by her lawyer, who had been the lover of her mother.
There are no exact parallels with the past of course, but at Palazzo Mocenigo the sense of history, the presence of ghosts, spirits and tangible decadence, is at the high-water mark. Byron already found it to be that way when he lived there with his tempestuous mistress, La Fornarina. Di Robilant describes how Chateaubriand came to visit Lucia, `the Doge's daughter' still 'beautiful in the shadow of old age', and tad a haunting vision: Byron's old mooring pole was still planted there, his coat of arms half erased by wind and saltwater.' Today in the garden there is a rabbit which could be left from Byron's collection of animals, which included various birds, two monkeys, a fox and a wolf. It belongs to the little girl who lives on the main floor of the palazzo with her chillingly regal grandmother and her no less beautiful mother, both widows. All three seem to be from another time and another world.
We moved in with our Russian nanny, who was also our housekeeper, but since it was so large a place we ended up also taking on a Venetian woman whose husband had a stall at the Rialto fish market. She took over the household. No one could understand her because she did not really speak Italian, only Venetian. She used to curse and carry on and come out with the most outrageous epithets and obscure proverbs, which were impossible to rebut because they were priceless. She caused havoc in the house. She was constantly rearranging the furniture, and throwing everything we owned into some merciless inferno that was supposed to be the laundry. But she was an incredible cook. The kitchen, where she set up residence, chain smoking and drinking vast quantities of red wine, was transformed into an alchemical laboratory out of which came forth food that was the equivalent of the philosopher's stone. We were in her thrall.
One time we gave a dinner in the main salon, the fondago, paved in undulating 16thcentury pastellone. All the Venetians came. Countess Foscari, our 90-year-old downstairs neighbour, in her black velvet hat with a veil, whom we had invited just so she would not complain about the noise, ended up staying until 2 a.m., monopolising the most eligible bachelors. It was Russian New Year and so we served vodka instead of wine. Another Mocenigo neighbour, a commissioner of the Belle Arti, fell down the stairs and broke her nose. In fact everyone got really drunk because the Venetian cook and the Russian nanny were quarrelling and no food ever arrived. A guest from Milan went up to the kitchen to investigate and offered a bribe of half a million lire. On his way back to the table he stumbled over a roast suckling pig keeping warm by the fireplace, but by then it was too late. The cook did finally emerge, but only to spend the rest of the night dancing, locked in tight embrace with our friend Francesco da Mosto, at whose house at another dinner I soon after met the writer Andrea di Robilant for the first time.
Like the first book he wrote, A Venetian Affair, this one is based on personal family letters discovered by his father, Alvise di Robilant, the last of his family to live in the Palazzo Mocenigo before it was sold. Alvise was tragically murdered in Florence in a mysterious case that has never been solved. In this second book, di Robilant meticulously researches and describes the last generation of the Mocenigo family and their ineluctable extinction, despite an ineffectual attempt to keep the name alive by passing it down to a bastard son — all poignantly coinciding with the end of the 1,000-year-old Venetian Republic, the Serenissima.
In the androne, the entrance hall of the palazzo, stands a huge marble statue of Napoleon, Venice's destroyer and despoiler, which is chilling and strange and also very beautiful. When I lived there we were told it had belonged to Byron, who had left it behind because it was too big to move. Di Robilant tells how it was actually commissioned by Alvise Mocenigo, the last of the Mocenigos, how Lucia, his wife and di Robilant's ancestress, tried to get rid of it and how, ironically, it is now the only thing left that still belongs to the family.
Palazzo Mocenigo is mysterious and spooky. Yet almost no one who lives there ever wants to leave. I certainly can say for myself that I left with the utmost regret.
Lucia in the Age of Napoleon by Andrea di Robilant is published by Faber.
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