The Contessa

Virginia Verasis, Contessa di Castiglione, was eighteen years old when Victor Emmannuel II sent her to Paris to seduce Napoleon III into sympathy for the cause of Italian unification. Already renowned as a beauty in her native Italy, she made an entrance into the haut monde of Paris unlike anything anyone had ever seen. It wasn’t long before the emperor was only one of her lovers, and when Italy became a kingdom with his support in 1861 it was in no small part thanks to the role she played. But it was not a role she necessarily wished to play, as Benedetta Craveri makes clear in her groundbreaking new book, drawing on previously unpublished archival material as well as the countess’s own diaries to piece together the puzzle that was Virginia. She was a seductress and a covert diplomat, yes, but she was also a gifted performer without a stage—perhaps the first person “famous for being famous”—immortalized in photographs that she herself staged, and which both defined the era and presaged all the poses of the selfie.

A legend in her time, Virginia wanted to be free at all costs, “as free as a cat,” and resented the weaponization of her beauty. The Contessa reveals a woman with many facets and at least as many contradictions, vain and visionary, charming and monstrous, impossible to know and impossible to ignore.