Casanova escaped a Venetian prison and talked France into a state lottery
Giacomo Casanova (1725 to 1798) is a byword for seduction, but his real legacy is a memoir. Written in French and published after his death, The Story of My Life is now valued as a frank and unusual window on eighteenth-century European manners, from gambling dens to royal courts.
He was born in Venice in 1725, the eldest of six children of the actress Zanetta Farussi and the actor and dancer Gaetano Casanova. His mother toured Europe's theatres, so his grandmother Marzia Baldissera raised him, and his father died when he was eight. Plagued by nosebleeds, he was taken by his grandmother to a witch surrounded by cats; the ointment failed, but the chanting enthralled him. A doctor blamed Venice's heavy air, and on his ninth birthday he was packed off to a boarding house in Padua, an abandonment he remembered bitterly.
The city shaped him. Venice was then Europe's playground, run by conservatives who tolerated vice and welcomed tourists, and a fixture of the Grand Tour for young aristocrats, especially British ones, drawn by Carnival, gambling houses and courtesans. Casanova studied law at the University of Padua and took minor church orders with an eye on canon law, but had no appetite for either. Instead he drifted into life as a gambler, violinist, swindler and writer.
He lived largely on his wits. He extracted money and favours from noble patrons by claiming secret knowledge of alchemy, cabbala and magic, and he often posed as an aristocrat, calling himself Count of Farussi after his mother's family or the invented Chevalier de Seingalt; after his second exile from Venice he signed French works as Jacques Casanova de Seingalt. Jailed in the Piombi prison by the Council of Ten for offences against religion and morals, he escaped. Later he helped persuade French officials to create a state lottery to raise revenue.
His memoir describes meetings with popes, cardinals and kings and with Voltaire, Goethe and Mozart, as well as a lifetime of tangled love affairs from adolescence into old age, which made his name a synonym for a libertine alongside Don Juan and Lothario. He spent his last years in Bohemia as librarian to Count Waldstein, living at Dux Castle, where he wrote the book.
Source: Giacomo Casanova
