Cavour

‘The whore of the Risorgimento’ or ‘the divine Countess’ – Virginia Oldoini Verasis di Castiglione was among the most extravagantly flamboyant figures of the 19th century, notorious principally as the mistress of Napoleon III. Drawing on thousands of unpublished documents, Benedetta Craveri’s biography of the woman whose name, according to the arch-priest of aesthetes Robert de Montesquiou, became ‘synonymous with beauty’ presents a nuanced portrait of an aristocratic adventuress. Her talent for seduction played a pivotal, yet largely unacknowledged, role in the unification of Italy.

This hefty book is more about context – the turbulent years of mid-19th-century Europe – than it is about its two protagonists. Details of the many popular uprisings of the time, plus the jockeying for position of the main players and the battles and intrigues involved, are so packed into its pages that teasing out the stories of the two empresses is not always easy. The early married life of Empress Elisabeth of Austria, known as Sisi, sounds appalling. Her older sister had been groomed to marry the young Emperor Franz Joseph, but the moment he saw Sisi, then only 15, she was the one he wanted. It was impossible to turn him down. Much of the future of Bavaria (her parents’ kingdom), let alone that of her own family, depended on his goodwill.