Anika Burgess at The New Yorker:
Oldoini was born in Florence, in 1837, just two years before the announcement of a new photographic medium: the daguerreotype. In 1854, at sixteen, she married the twenty-eight-year-old Count de Castiglione; the following spring, they had a son, Georgio, and she had her first documented extramarital affair. Near the end of 1855, the family moved to Paris. The move involved some diplomatic intrigue: present-day Italy was then a patchwork of independent states, and Oldoini’s cousin, the politician Camillo Benso, Count di Cavour, tasked her with promoting Italian unification at Napoleon III’s court. It seems to have been clear to di Cavour that, no matter what happened, Oldoini could not be ignored.
“Never have I seen such a beauty, and never again will I see one like her,” Princess Pauline Metternich recalled in a memoir. Oldoini arrived late at events so as to make a grand entrance. When she went to the theatre, audiences would allegedly stand and applaud at the sight of Oldoini in her box. “She is the queen of beauty, poise, and grace, and when she arrives, she looks like Venus strolling by,” gushed the fashion journal Le Bon Ton. At one summer soirée, in 1856, the countess and the French Emperor spent a long time alone on an island in a lake. By winter, their affair was common knowledge.
more here.
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