Solving the mystery of a doomed love between an 18th-Century Venetian aristocrat and an Anglo-Venetian woman brought Andrea di Robilant closer to his father...
Andrea's father, Count Alvise di Robilant, found a box of “very mysterious, very old letters" in the Venetian palazzo where he grew up.
The family prised the letters apart, and realised they were partially written in a secret code.
"It was very mysterious and very beautiful to look at," says Andrea, a journalist. "Imagine these... 18th-Century scrolls with all these squiggles and signs, it was like a page of ancient hieroglyphics."
Andrea’s father set out to crack the code – and it soon became clear that these were love letters.
"[They] were written by an ancestor of ours called Andrea Memmo to a wonderful, wonderful young Anglo-Venetian girl called Giustiniana Wynne," says Andrea.
But theirs was an impossible love.
The couple couldn’t marry because Memmo's family was too grand for Giustiniana - and her mother feared Memmo's attention might prevent her from finding a suitable match.
They went to great lengths to see each other, writing letters hand-delivered by servants running through the streets of Venice.
"They really take us in... all the dark corners of Venice, in the theatres, in the gambling houses, in the dark alleys, in the gondolas," says Andrea.
In one of her letters, Giustiniana writes: "Ah, Memmo, so much happiness. I was with you for close to two hours. I listened to your voice. You held my hand... If only I could be free and tell the world about my love!"
The romance of the letters, and the couple's forbidden love, enthralled Andrea's father. But, in 1997, someone broke into his house and murdered him. There was no explanation for the crime, and Andrea was plunged into grief.
"When the death of a very close person to you happens in that way, you enter a strange, bizarre space in which you fluctuate between belief and disbelief and general confusion and deep pain all at the same time," he says.
During the police investigation, news of the letters leaked out to the press.
"It was really grotesque," says Andrea, "because people were trying to draw links between this 18th-Century love story and my father's murder. It was just pure chaos."
Andrea decided, in honour of his father, to finish the book his dad had wanted to write about the lovers.
"I think he'd become sort of secretly in love with Giustiniana because she was such an engaging, attractive girl, and he had a great deal of affection for Memmo as well," he says. "That's why he clung to this story."
Writing the book helped Andrea feel close to his father.
"It brings satisfaction, even perhaps a little bit of joy that you somehow strangely share with a dead person, but it doesn't bring closure," says Andrea.
He still doesn't know why his father was killed. But, in investigating the story of the lovers, he has grown to love Giustiniana and Memmo just as his father did.
"[They] are very much present in my life. It's really quite extraordinary, the closeness I feel to them. And, of course, every time I go through that experience, I share it with my father."