Andrea Di Robilant Reihenfolge der Bücher

The fascinating story of the Venetian who helped to map the World during the Renaissance, by the author of A Venetian Affair and Autumn in Venice.

The remarkable story of Hemingway's love affair with both the city of Venice and the muse he found there.

In the 1380s and 90s, Nicolo and Antonio Zen journeyed from Venice up the North Atlantic, encountering warrior princes, fighting savage natives and, just possibly, reaching the New World a full century before Columbus.

A century before Columbus arrived in America, two brothers from Venice are said to have explored parts of the New World. They became legends during the Renaissance, and then the source of a great scandal that would discredit their story. Today, they have been largely forgotten. In this very original work—part history, part travelogue—Andrea di Robilant chronicles his discovery of a travel narrative published in 1558 by the Venetian statesman Nicolò Zen. The text and its fascinating nautical map re-created the travels of two of the author’s ancestors, brothers who claimed to have explored the North Atlantic in the 1380s and 1390s. Di Robilant sets out to discover why the Zens’ account later came under attack as one of the greatest frauds in geographical history. Was their map—and even their journey—partially or perhaps entirely faked?

In 1787, the beautiful Lucia is married off to Alvise Mocenigo, scion of one of the most powerful Venetian families. But their life as a golden couple will be suddenly transformed when Venice falls to Bonaparte. We witness Lucia's painful series of miscarriages and the pressure on her to produce an heir; her impassioned affair with an Austrian officer; the glamour and strain of her career as a hostess in Vienna; and her amazing firsthand account of the defeat of Napoleon in 1814. With his brave and articulate heroine, Andrea di Robilant has once again reached across the centuries, and deep into his own past, to bring history to rich and vivid life on the page.

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.

Andrea di Robilants Vater machte eine sensationelle Entdeckung: Auf dem Dachboden des Familien-Palazzos am venezianischen Canal Grande fand er eine modrige Kiste voller Briefe, übersäht mit Weinflecken und Siegelwachs. Es waren mehr als hundert Briefe, die in den fünfziger und sechziger Jahren des 18. Jahrhunderts geschrieben wurden. Sie erzählen die Geschichte einer nicht standesgemäßen Lieben zwischen dem venezianischen Edelmann Andrea Memmo und einer protestantischen, noch dazu unehelich geborenen Halbengländerin, Giustiniana Wynne. Diese Briefe, die in "Maskenspiele" erstmals veröffentlicht werden, vervollständigen ein Liebesdrama, das bisher nur durch die Andeutungen in Giacomo Casanovas Memoiren bekannt war. "Nie hätte ich geglaubt, dass mir gegeben sei, mit solcher Heftigkeit zu lieben", schreibt Giustiniana zu Anfang der langjährigen Affäre. Doch das Paar kann nicht häufig zusammenkommen, meist können sie sich ihre Gefühle nur in Briefe versichern. In diesen Briefen berichten sie zugleich von ihrem Alltag: Andrea erzählt von seiner Montesquieu-Lektüre und Giustiniana von ihren Besuchen im Ridotto, einem der beliebtesten Salons zu jener Zeit, als sich Venedig dauerhaft im Festtaumel des Karnevals befand. So wird in "Maskenspiele" nicht nur Zeugnis von einer wahren, längst vergangenen Liebe abgelegt, sondern auch ein äußerst farbenprächtiges Bild von Venedigs Glanzepoche entworfen.