Byron’s Landlady

Andrea di Robilant has a new book about his great-great-great-great grandmother, Lucia Mocenigo, the daughter of Andrea Memmo from his A Venetian Affair and the wife of Alvise Mocenigo. Lucia later became a friend of Empress Josephine, a lady-in-waiting at the court of Napoleon’s stepson, Prince Eugène de Beauharnais, and eventually Lord Byron’s landlady, renting out the piano nobile of the Palazzo Mocenigo to the poet and his pets. Andrea di Robilant’s Lucia: A Venetian Life in the Age of Napoleon, published last autumn in Britain and Australia, hit bookstores in the States last week.