The Contessa
Jun 2026 · New York Review of Books
Ebook
512
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About this ebook
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, 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she necessarily wished to play, as Benedetta Craveri makes clear in her groundbreaking new book, drawing on previously unpublished archival material as well as the countess’s own diaries to piece together the puzzle that was Virginia.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.
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she necessarily wished to play, as Benedetta Craveri makes clear in her groundbreaking new book, drawing on previously unpublished archival material as well as the countess’s own diaries to piece together the puzzle that was Virginia.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.
About the author
Benedetta Craveri is currently a professor of French literature at the University Suor Orsola Benincasa, Naples. She is a corresponding member of 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.
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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