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    A Venetian Affair: A True Tale of Forbidden Love in the 18th Century
    A Venetian Affair: A True Tale of Forbidden Love in the 18th Century
    A Venetian Affair: A True Tale of Forbidden Love in the 18th Century
    Audiobook11 hours

    A Venetian Affair: A True Tale of Forbidden Love in the 18th Century

    Written by Andrea di Robilant

    Narrated by Paul Hecht

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    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, enlisting 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 unbelievable 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 othe
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateNov 25, 2011
    ISBN9781456122836
    A Venetian Affair: A True Tale of Forbidden Love in the 18th Century

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    Reviews for A Venetian Affair

    3.5/5

    101 ratings9 reviews

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    • 3/5
      This book started out with so much promise. A box of love letters two hundred years old is found in a Venice family's palace attic. That alone is enough to stir interest. However, once the author starts to piece together the stories of the letters' authors, Andrea Memmo and Giustiniana Wynne, the tale becomes incessantly dull. It's a lot of back and forth. Yes, we can be together. No, we can't. On and on it goes until the reader gets so tired of this tale. Yes, the two principal characters loved each other. Of that there is no doubt. But, was that love story, with no possible chance of a happy ending, worthy of a book? I think not. Still, the snippets of Venetian life contained in the book are fascinating to read about.
    • 3/5
      Another story of forbidden love between a Venetian patrician and an English girl of “unsuitable” parentage. This book is also told through letters and the amazing part is the things the lovers put down on paper. It was an interesting book to learn about the singular Venetian culture, but it was a little bit hard to get through, because much of it was the repetitive.
    • 5/5
      What an unexpected gem of a book! Based on the correspondence of the two lovers, it tells the sorry of a 17th century romance between a venetian patrician and his lover, high class, but not marriageable by the arcane rules of Venice at thetime. It is written by a direct descendant of the male "lead" who wonderfully manages to stay out of sight, to faithfully document the life and love affair of the protagonists with embellishing the tale, and still produce a riveting and fascinating story. The only licence taken is to render the translations of the letters in current colloquial English. In his hands the love affair becomes timeless, and the characters so vibrant and alive. This is truly a magical achievement. Read March 2013.
    • 2/5
      I was bored to tears by this one. It’s the nonfiction account of a love affair that took place in the 18th century in Venice. The author wrote the book after his father found a collection of letters between their ancestor, a Venetian nobleman, and a young woman. It started out strong and quickly pulled me in, but soon the story was bogged down with a nonstop back and forth. The melodrama between the lovers, the restraints of their society and their different social classes made the whole thing impossible. I felt like the book could have been much shorter, but the author wanted to include every scrap of correspondence he had between the two. BOTTOM LINE: The story is interesting because it’s nonfiction, but it should have been much shorter. What should be a fast-paced love story quickly became a tedious tug-of-war.  
    • 2/5
      The words ‘Forbidden Love’ in the title attracted me to this book. And it sounded so great in the description. It was mostly set in Venice, so that was nice, but otherwise I shouldn’t have wasted my time finishing it. Yawn.
    • 5/5
      A beautiful story, half based on historical fact and embellished by the author's imagination.
    • 4/5
      Account of a torrid love affair between a Venetian nobleman and a more common woman set in the 1750s--the last days of the Venetian Republic.
    • 5/5
      Another book set in Venice, which I thoroughly loved, is A Venetian Affair by Andrea Di Robilant. Di Robilant uses a trove of love letters from the eighteenth century to weave a tale of romance and intrigue in "the twilight of the golden era of Venice". The letters belonged to an ancestor of the Di Robilant family. Some were in code which Andrea and his father had to break before reading them. This is the best book about Venice I have ever read, bar none (even Shakespeare). The cast of characters are vibrant and include famous clergy, aristocrats and even Casanova. Obviously a good part of the story had to be imagined but Mr. Di Robilant has done a masterful job of blending old and new.
    • 4/5
      I just finished The Venetian Affair, and i have to say a loud huzzah! for the adept writing of Andrea Di Robilant. Brilliant writing pieces together the letters, and his work in understanding their lives as well as their voices is commendable. The book ought to be required reading of any aspiring historian, as it relies on primary documents, is well-research, well-cited, and anything but dry. The voices of the clandestine lovers comes through amid the tapestry of mid-eighteenth century venice, spans the decline of the great city and is practically a primer on social and political life in England and on the Continent during the Seven Years' War. Finally, as the letters cease, Andrea Di Robilant does not leave the story there, but researches out the end of their lives, seeing her return to Italy, his rise in politics in Venice, her growing literary career, and ending ultimately with a quote from her penultimate letter.Brilliantly done, it reads well. Not only does Di Robilant care about this long-ago couple and their passions, positions and persecution, the reader is impervious to help but care about them as well. As a work of history, Di Robilant suceeds masterfully; as a first work at all, it soars.