Rating: 
Summary: Amazing book!
Review: I have not left too much feedback in the past. I adored this book. It really brings you into the world of Giustinana and Memmo. I fell in love with them both, even with their faults. This book was wonderful in another way to me. It reminded me we are here on this earth a short time. The fact that the letters have survived for us to read is a miracle. I am looking forward to a return trip to Venice so I can trace the footsteps of these two very real people.
Rating:
Summary: I loved this book!
Review: I haven't reviewed a book before on Amazon, but felt compelled to do so after reading this book. I'm not typically a big non-fiction fan, but I loved this book. It transports you back to 18th century Venice/Europe and, while providing a well-researched historical background, also provides an amazing and touching love story. I can't recommend it enough.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting book!
Review: I liked this book very much. It was very interesting with all the details of Venetian life in the 1750's. Reading history of that era is one thing, but reading these letters really pulled you into the time so that you really got to know how lives were led. You see just how similar we are to people 250 years ago and just how DIFFERENT life was. I am in awe of the star-crossed lovers, especially of Miss Wynne.
Rating:
Summary: You'd have to be a coldhearted prune to resist this one...
Review: I swooned, I laughed, I wept....and I kept having to remind
myself that this was not fiction but the intense soap-
opera called Life. It was so hard to think of the doomed nature of the beautiful love affair, and yet I followed the book to the bittersweet end, for I felt such affection for the protagonists, especially Giustinana, that passionate woman of love, letters, fashion and society. This is a book about soul mates...and it proves that true lovers do meet up in future lives. Perhaps we shall even see Memmo and Giustinana made flesh and blood on the Big Screen one of these days. How divine! I wish to thank Andrea di Robilant for unearthing and bringing us the gift of this exquisite
story.
Rating: 
Summary: I couldn't finish it.
Review: I think I got through about 20 percent. Why couldn't I finish it? Maybe it was too real. Maybe too hopeless. Maybe lengthy conversations about love are just too boring. The characters annoyed me. She became increasingly insecure, constantly seeking reassurance, when she was separated from her lover. She whines, she pouts, she makes accusations. Although, if I were in her situation, almost a prisoner, as well-chaperoned women were at that time, I would have been just as miserable and passive, since women had few alternatives then. These lovers loose a chance to be together long-term, because they don't have enough self-control and discretion. It's possible that the book gets better later on; I just couldn't stand it any longer.
Rating:
Summary: Inexpressibly sad
Review: I wholeheartedly agree with all the readers who have praised Andrea di Robilant's elegant and stylish writing (since he is Italian, and thus English is not his first language, his merit is double). I also wish to praise his genuine involvement with his subjects, Andrea and Giustiniana, the warmth and respect with which he treats them, and the way he honours the love his late father felt for them.Enough has been said about the book's gripping development and the way in which it brings to life the colourful and (alas) terribly gossipy and poisoned Venetian society of the time. I will add that, in spite of its liveliness, I found the book tremendously sad and moving. You can actually feel the two lovers drifting apart, separated first by their different social circumstances, then by geographical distance. You suffer at the way they try to keep their relationship alive under a different form (as friends and "brothers") while silently mourning the imposed loss of their love. You wonder at the way in which they describe their other love affairs to each other, trying perhaps to make their unnatural estrangement (and subsequent need to go on with their lives) seem normal. And you marvel at the irony of a world which would not allow them to be together while both were single, but which would permit their being lovers while Giustiniana was married, or after she had been widowed. Of course, many questions arise. One such, that kept surfacing in my mind, was whether they did strive hard enough. It was surprising to me that the alternative of elopement, or of getting married in spite of the consequences, was never seriously considered. If my assumptions are right, it would perhaps add another issue to this touching story of human feelings: whether their love was really that deep, or there was an element of obsession, and perhaps social defiance, that did not want to go that far. In any case, the story is wonderful and lends itself to varied readings, which Mr. di Robilant never imposes on the reader, presenting the naked facts (as far as they can be reconstructed) for each of us to make his or her very personal interpretation.
Rating: 
Summary: who cares?
Review: i've read hundreds if books in 59 years and this is the most vacuous and uninteresting of them all. the theme, if you can call it that, is redundantly force fed until you just don't know if you can keep any more down. the best part is the end.
Rating: 
Summary: a reader
Review: It's stories like these that seem to ooze from the cobbled streets of Venice, thick and glistening. It is a city of fluids, of many kinds - which drip and nourish and wash away. This love affair is the same.
Author di Robilant writes concisely, logically, and without sensationalism. It's well-researched, ebbing on all sides of the central story with the political, economic, and social histories of Venice c. 1750-1795. If only di Robilant could take Dan Brown's information/theories and write the text for him (as Brown is painfully Danielle-Steele-esque in his language). Also, do read the prologue. It explains how the un-natural death of his father resulted in this work, and makes the overall labor of love that much more.
Rating:
Summary: Masterfully crafted tale
Review: Mr. Andrea di Robilant wrote a brilliant account of the impossible love affair between two Venetian youths: Andrea Memmo, of aristocratic stock, and Giustiniana Wynne, the daughter of an English nobleman and a Greek-Venetian mother with a questionable past. The story is based on 250-year old letters found by the author's father in their family palazzo in Venice. Mr. di Robilant could have easily yielded to the temptation of writing one of those fashionable historical novels where fiction and reality get intertwined to such a degree that the reader never knows where one ends and the other begins. However, he opted for a more challenging and difficult road by strictly sticking to the facts which he carefully researched. One cannot fail to admire the way he handles every single one of the many characters that make up the Andrea-Giustiniana story, from her mother to Casanova. He treats them with tenderness and respect, as if he was taking a precious and fragile heirloom piece-that may break at the slightest vibration- out of a box. In the process, he brings Giustiniana and Andrea to life with a force that can only be rooted in honesty.
I can see Mr. di Robilant walking from his rented house at campiello agli Incurabili to the Museum Querini-Stampalia, where according to his own account he wrote most of the book, and briefly pausing at campo Santo Stefano to guess in which of its many corners Andrea and Giustiniana furtively met. This book brought me back to Venice in a new and unexpected way. Next time I am there I will look for that campiello across the Grand Canal from where Andrea contemplated Giustiniana watch the boats go by and I will smile.
Rating:
Summary: Andrea di Robilant talks about his book
Review: October 7, 2003 Tonight (Andrea di Robilant gave the first U.S. public reading from his book "A Venetian Affair," about the romance between his ancestor, the Venetian nobleman Andrea Memmo, and the Anglo-Venetian Giustiniana Wynn during the last decades of the Venetian republic. Andrea di Robilant inherited the project from his father, who had discovered Memmo's letters in the attic of the family's ancestral palace in Venice, but died before finishing the story. A former Washington correspondent of La Stampa, the young author spoke at the Italian Cultural Center in nearly unaccented but strangely halting English. He called his book, basically an annotated compilation of the 250-year-old correspondence, "a unique tool to tell us what was going on in the heads and hearts of these [17th Century Venetians.]" He was surrounded by costume sketches from Bellini's "Norma," and behind him a pair of photographic eyes stared out at the audience. The beautiful female eyes were lithographed on the shade of a post-modern lamp. Over time the lovers separated, and Andrea Memmo apparently shared Giustiniana's affection with his close friend Casanova. The two lived separate lives, but apparently carried on a life-long correspondence. In fact, di Robilant found a packet of Giustiniana's letters in a collection of Casanova relics that resided not in Venice, or Paris, or London but in Randolph-Macon College in Virginia. He learned of the source in part through his mother, a Randolph-Macon alumna and native Virginian. (Mystery English skill resolved.) Di Robilant ended with a poignant letter from Giustiniana lamenting to Andrea the end of the affair. "Well, this was Eighteenth Century Venice, not Hollywood," di Robilant shrugged. The book is published by Knopf, and is summarized by the author in an article in the Aug. 18 & 25 edition of The New Yorker.
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