La famiglia di Daniele Manin (review)

Reminiscent of earlier eras, this handsome volume (with footnotes at the bottom of the page) evokes the Risorgimento without directly addressing politics and recalls a patriotic historiography long out of fashion. Mueller deviates from that tradition, however, by not reproducing letters in full, summarizing them instead. Her sympathetic and informative commentary, as gentle as that of an elderly aunt pouring through the family album (the study has forty-nine photographs), carries the book. Aided by lavish notes, the book also points to social issues central to much current research. Thus, disparate approaches intersect, brought full circle through focus on the family.

Mueller begins with the Manins' seventeen-year-old daughter, who turned from reading Plutarch's life of Caesar to ask, "Mamma, what does epilepsy mean?" The anguish of life with her epilepsy becomes a major thread of the family drama. It started with Daniele Manin as an ambitious young attorney who read the major European and Italian authors; edited learned legal texts; translated from Latin, Greek, and Hebrew; and wrote on the history of Venice, while negotiating for a railroad line (the very symbol of progress) from Milan to Venice. He then fell in love with Teresa Persinotti, whom he met in one of the city's prominent intellectual salons. Their early love letters fairly burst with admiration for Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the ideals of the French Revolution, and Italian patriotism. Passionate letters, full of high seriousness, they forecast a life between intellectual equals; their subsequent delight in marriage and ambitious plans for educating their children (Emilia, born in 1826, and Giorgio, born five years later) predict happiness.

Instead, their correspondence reveals Teresa's gradual subordination to worry about everyone's health, about her children, and about the dangers to Daniele when arrested and imprisoned by the Austrians in 1848 and about the risks that they faced as he led the revolution and the new Venetian republic in time of war. Devoted parents, Daniel and Teresa made sure that both children read the classics, learned languages, and studied mathematics. In seeking a private tutor for their epileptic daughter, however, they considered the dangers of youthful (and feminine) passions, choosing a priest tolerant of their Deism. Daniele read recent works on epilepsy, starting with Erasmus Darwin; and they consulted the best physicians available in the Veneto and later in Paris. Over her lifetime, Emilia endured treatments with herbs, drugs, electricity, baths, bleeding, and magnetism, none of which brought lasting relief. If there is something remarkably modern in the Manins' comprehension for Teresa's sister, caught in an unhappy affair with a married man, there is something disturbingly modern in the recurrences of depression: Emilia's understandable and public, Teresa's intimated but hidden, Manin's a response to fear of blindness and to familial and political disappointments.

When the Venetian republic fell after only seventeen months, following an extended Austrian seige, the family sailed into exile. Theresa's letters to friends, sisters, and brothers described the despair of their last days in Venice and on the crowded ship that took them to Corfu at the end of August, 1849, for difficult weeks in quarantine. Just days after they finally landed in Marseilles, Theresa died of the cholera that had racked Venice. Manin and his two children made their way to Paris, where he eked out a meager living by giving Italian lessons. Emily died there in 1854, followed by Manin three years later, an old man at fifty- three.

The dwindling family's gloom was only sporadically lifted by considerable (and historically significant) moral support. A stoic, loving correspondence with their extended family is brightened somewhat by outpourings of admiration and sympathy—on Corfu, in Marseille at Theresa's death, in the French press, and at Emilia's funeral, which the size of the crowd and the famous people in attendance made into a notable public event. Manin remained regularly in touch with the principal Italian exiles and with an astonishing array of France's leading progressive...