{"id":601,"date":"2008-04-30T11:37:52","date_gmt":"2008-04-30T11:37:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2008\/04\/lucia.html"},"modified":"2008-04-30T11:37:52","modified_gmt":"2008-04-30T11:37:52","slug":"lucia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2008\/04\/lucia.html","title":{"rendered":"Lucia"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last night, I finished Lucia: A Venetian Life in the Age of Napoleon<\/em><\/a>, which was an excellent way to spend time.
\nIt’s the story of the author’s great-great-great-great grandmother, born into one of the ruling Venetian families, married into another. He’s able to tell the story in great detail because Lucia and those to whom she wrote kept most of their correspondence (even her philandering husband kept all of the little love notes penned by his paramours) <\/em>and she was a committed and observant correspondent. Rather astonishing.
\nThrough Lucia, we see the fortunes – rather mis<\/em>fortunes of Venice during the years of constant war between Napoleon and everyone else, a period in which the fading Venetian Republic finally collapsed, was defeated and occupied by either the French or the Austrians for a very long time.\u00a0 We get insight into medical practices as Lucia struggles with miscarriages, pregnancy, and illness, agriculture as her husband tries to create a model, progressive community on the mainland, and, of course into politics. Because of the intimate nature of the letters, we even get some insight into her spiritual growth – Mass attendance is duly noted, but also noted is a period in which Lucia decides she really wants to know more about her faith:
\nLucia ordered The Life of Jesus <\/span>from a bookshop in Milan, and she and Alvisetto <\/em>(her son) curled up together in bed every evening to read three chapters of the big volume. ‘I’m finding this book very useful. I had never read the life of Jesus as a whole but only in bits and pieces. In fact, what I knew of it usually came form the study of paintings and sculptures when we were young.’<\/em>\u00a0 (200)
\n\u00a0Lucia is a Venetian, but her travels – mostly because of her husband, but not always – take her to other points in Italy, Vienna and, for a good bit of time, Paris. For a time she served as a lady-in-waiting to Princess Augusta-Amelia (wife of Prince Eugene, Viceroy of the Kingdom of Italy) in Milan, and her accounts of the tedium of the position are amusing but rather sad.
\nShe and her husband never have a surviving child together, but they each have illegitimate children, with the sone Lucia had with her Irish lover serving in the Austrian army eventually adopted by her husband as his heir.
\nI read a book like this and I keep trying to imagine it as historical fiction, and all I can think of how it would be mucked up by most attempts, which would undoubtedly manage to work in all sorts of anachronisms in terms of Lucia’s emotional, social and intellectual life. This was far better – Robilant does a marvelous job of introducing us to his ancestor whose late nights scratching out letter after letter to her sister, her son, her husband and others end up providing us with a gift – the gift of a window into a past age, in through which we can see how much we have – and haven’t – changed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last night, I finished Lucia: A Venetian Life in the Age of Napoleon, which was an excellent way to spend time. It’s the story of the author’s great-great-great-great grandmother, born into one of the ruling Venetian families, married into another. He’s able to tell the story in great detail because Lucia and those to whom…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-601","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nLucia - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2008\/04\/lucia.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Lucia - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Last night, I finished Lucia: A Venetian Life in the Age of Napoleon, which was an excellent way to spend time. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. 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