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The Contessa
Celebrity, seductress, covert diplomat. Virginia Verasis, Contessa di Castiglione, was the original "famous for being famous" It...
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Celebrity, seductress, covert diplomat. Virginia Verasis, Contessa di Castiglione, was the original "famous for being famous" It Girl. This thrilling, transporting biography explores the countessa's fascinating, provocative, and dramatic life in all its mess and glory. Virginia Verasis, Countess of Castiglione--the nineteenth-century aristocrat, socialite, and beauty--has become famous for the enigmatic and operatic photographs of herself that she choreographed and staged, now seen as masterworks of the art. But her life story is no less extraordinary than her artistic vision, as Benedetta Craveri shows us in this groundbreaking new biography, which draws on archival material and the countess's own diaries to piece together the puzzle that was Virginia.
Eighteen years old when Victor Emmanuel I sent her to Paris on a special assignment, and already renowned as a beauty in her native Italy, Virginia was tapped to persuade Napoleon III to support the cause of Italian unification. Her entrance into the haut monde of Paris was unlike anything anyone had ever seen--a performance by a performer who made the world her stage. When Italy became a kingdom with the emperor's backing in 1861, it was in no small part thanks to the role that Virginia had played. But it was not a role that she necessarily wished to play. She wanted to be free at all costs--sexually, financially, artistically--and she resented men's weaponization of her beauty.
The Contessa reveals a woman of many facets and at least as many contradictions, vain and visionary, charming and monstrous, impossible to know and impossible to ignore.
Author: Benedetta Craveri
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Published: 09/15/2026
Pages: 520
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.40lbs
Size: 8.40h x 5.70w x 1.20d
ISBN: 9798896230465
Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 08/01/2026
Library Journal 09/11/2026 pg. 1
About the Author
Benedetta Craveri is a Professor of French literature. She taught for many years at the University Suor Orsola Benincasa in Naples. She is a member of the Accademia dei Lincei and contributes to The New York Review of Books and to the cultural pages of the Italian newspaper La Repubblica. Her books include Madame du Deffand and Her World, Mistresses and Queens, and The Age of Conversation (available from New York Review Books). She is married to a French diplomat and in 2017 was awarded the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca by l'Institut de France. Alex Andriesse's essays and poems have appeared in Granta, Review of Contemporary Fiction, and Literary Imagination. His translations include Roberto Bazlen's Notes Without a Text and Other Writings and François-René de Chateaubriand's Memoirs from Beyond the Grave: 1768-1800 and 1800-15 both of which are also available from NYRB Classics. He lives in the Netherlands.
Eighteen years old when Victor Emmanuel I sent her to Paris on a special assignment, and already renowned as a beauty in her native Italy, Virginia was tapped to persuade Napoleon III to support the cause of Italian unification. Her entrance into the haut monde of Paris was unlike anything anyone had ever seen--a performance by a performer who made the world her stage. When Italy became a kingdom with the emperor's backing in 1861, it was in no small part thanks to the role that Virginia had played. But it was not a role that she necessarily wished to play. She wanted to be free at all costs--sexually, financially, artistically--and she resented men's weaponization of her beauty.
The Contessa reveals a woman of many facets and at least as many contradictions, vain and visionary, charming and monstrous, impossible to know and impossible to ignore.
Author: Benedetta Craveri
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Published: 09/15/2026
Pages: 520
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.40lbs
Size: 8.40h x 5.70w x 1.20d
ISBN: 9798896230465
Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 08/01/2026
Library Journal 09/11/2026 pg. 1
About the Author
Benedetta Craveri is a Professor of French literature. She taught for many years at the University Suor Orsola Benincasa in Naples. She is a member of the Accademia dei Lincei and contributes to The New York Review of Books and to the cultural pages of the Italian newspaper La Repubblica. Her books include Madame du Deffand and Her World, Mistresses and Queens, and The Age of Conversation (available from New York Review Books). She is married to a French diplomat and in 2017 was awarded the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca by l'Institut de France. Alex Andriesse's essays and poems have appeared in Granta, Review of Contemporary Fiction, and Literary Imagination. His translations include Roberto Bazlen's Notes Without a Text and Other Writings and François-René de Chateaubriand's Memoirs from Beyond the Grave: 1768-1800 and 1800-15 both of which are also available from NYRB Classics. He lives in the Netherlands.
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