Margherita

For Peggy Guggenheim, she was the First Lady of Venice. In 1920, twenty-five-year-old Margherita, who delivered newspapers in her hometown of Treviso, became the First Lady of Venice through her marriage to the nobleman Antonio Revedin. Today, her name is forgotten: yet Margherita knew how to make herself the center of a city that was reinventing itself with her open-minded nature. Peggy Guggenheim became her best friend, and the artist parties on the terrace of the Hotel Excelsior, to which she invited Greta Garbo, Coco Chanel, Clark Gable, and Pablo Picasso, became legendary. Jana Revedin captivatingly recounts the fateful years of Venice—and her own family.