A Venetian Affair
published by Knopf, 2003
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, during which they
enlisted 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 extraordinary 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.
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Lucia: A Venetian Life in the Age of Napoleon
published by Knopf, 2008
In 1787, the beautiful Lucia Memmo is married off to Alvise Mocenigo, scion of one of the most powerfulVenetian families. But their life as a golden couple is 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. In this rich and fascinating sequel to A Venetian Affair,
Andrea di Robilant has once again reached across the centuries, and deep into his own past, to bring history
to vivid life on the page. read more
Irresistible North (Knopf) / Venetian Navigators (Faber)
published by Knopf and Faber in 2011
While working in the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice, Andrea di Robilant came across a curious mapof the North Atlantic published in 1558. It was attached to the back of a small book with an alluring title:
On the Discovery of Frislanda, Estlanda, Engroveland, Estotilanda, Drogio and Icaria under the North Pole.
It turned out to be a travel narrative describing the fourteenth century journey of two Venetian merchants
and navigators, the brothers Nicolò and Antonio Zen. Both the book and the map had had a great impact on
late Renaissance geography and cartography. Queen Elizabeth herself relied on the Zen narrative to establish
the foundations of a British Empire in the North Atlantic. But in the 1830s a Danish admiral stunned the world
by denouncing the book as one of the great forgeries of all time. Forty years later a report by the chief
geographer of The Royal Geographical Society reached the opposite conclusion, and what had long been
considered “one of the greatest puzzles of all literature was no longer a puzzle at all.” But the stain of forgery
never really went away and the story of the Zen brothers gradually faded into oblivion. Part travel narrative,
part investigative history, Irresistible North brings back to life this fascinating yet baffling Venetian saga
as Andrea di Robilant follows the footsteps of Nicolò and Antonio Zen from Venice to Orkney, Shetland,
the Faroes, Iceland and as far as Greenland. read more