Love, youth, and politics in the twilight of the Venetian Republic

Review of A Venetian Affair: A True Story of Impossible Love in the Eighteenth Century by Andrea di Robilant

This is a book about a great passion between a young patrician and a woman from a “questionable past”. The author's approach – it was really a family enterprise based on the 250-year old letters his father found from a direct ancestor – is to paint a wide tableau of the era from the point of view of two young and doomed lovers. Though this may sound mel…