The Contessa

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.