His two-wheel adventure from Venice to China, undertaken to mark the 700th anniversary of Marco Polo’s death, earned him the title of “Venetian of the Year 2024.” A History graduate with a thesis on Gambling in 18th-Century Venice, Alberto Fiorin inevitably crossed paths with the history and legend of Giacomo Casanova, and here he offers us his personal portrayal…
All I can say about me is that I have always loved freedom, truth, and love, which accounted for quite some inconvenience. Those who believe in these ideals, in fact, are always going to encounter slanderers ready to stab them in the back.
Sorcerer, thief, spy, forger, traitor, swindler, slanderer, atheist, cheat, con man, spy, fraudster, kabbalist, blasphemer, alchemist. In fewer words: the vilest man alive. That’s what has been said and written about me.
Ladies and gentlemen – ladies, especially – please pay no mind to these baseless accusations. Believe none of these lies. They have been spread by mean persons who either don’t know me or merely want to take revenge after I treated them like they certainly deserved.
And yet, in some sense, these vicious, obscene, false, vile names honour me. Yes, they honour Giacomo Girolamo Casanova, a.k.a. Knight of Seingalt, the worthy son of Zanetta La Buranella and Gaetano Giuseppe Giacomo Casanova. Many enemies… much honour! Enemies I had many, indeed, that much I can tell you… As for honour, the judgment may go to future generations.
All I can say about me is that I have always loved freedom, truth, and love, which accounted for quite some inconvenience. Those who believe in these ideals, in fact, are always going to encounter slanderers ready to stab them in the back. Yet I, Giacomo Casanova, didn’t give a care in the world, and kept going on my way. In my life, I enjoyed and relished life to the last drop and tasted every one of its exhilarating flavours.
Who was Giacomo Casanova? Who is he?
Let me be the one to tell you. I have known myself since birth!
Fairly wealthy, nature endowed me with good looks. I was born a gambler (“the handsomest gambler in Europe”!), a prodigal spender, a sharp orator, not in the least modest, daring, a philanderer, ready to trick all my rivals out of my way, a lover of only the friendliest companies. I have been all this and more. It is no mystery that many have found my personality irksome.
After all, my life has been a long, racing pursuit. I have always chased after life, even though it was mostly life chasing me. I never ran from it, ever. Neither before women, nor before a betrayed husband, nor before a fencing challenge, a pistol, or the lusty ardour of an insatiable nymph.
True, sometimes I eluded pursuits, I happened to cheat, I had to leave town in the dead of night to escape guards a few envious enemies unleashed on me – but I just cannot stand prison.
Again, let me be the one to tell you. I, who earned my freedom escaping the harshest, most infamous prison in Europe, the Venetian Piombi, a place where summer heat suffocates you, and winter rigour chills you to the bone, mist eats away at your lungs, and rats as big as cats cannot wait to gnaw at you. This, gentlemen, is my very civilized fatherland, the Most Serene Republic of Venice – so civilized and so serene that it is tightening the noose around its own neck with the hands of a noble fallen from grace. God only knows how close the end is! I think it is, and I am sorry it is, but my sympathies extend only to real Venetians, and not to those powdered wigs who decide not to decide, all the while thinking they are thinking! If there is justice in this world, this sad little show is about to finally end, may Saint James the Great, the Apostle and my namesake, assist!
As for women … oh, women! How beautiful they are, how challenging it is to conquer them, how invigorating the love that pumps through my veins and that renews every night.
As for women … oh, women! How beautiful they are, how challenging it is to conquer them, how invigorating the love that pumps through my veins and that renews every night. A magical ritual on a soft altar, where we sacrifice to Eros our most intimate essence, our soul! Women always chased after me, always loved me – and I, in turn, have always loved them. I never cared for class, age, conditions, and satisfied the very last one of them. Dancers, countesses, whores, actresses, marchionesses, maids, travellers, nuns, sinners, daughters, mothers, grandmothers, naïve, lusty, timid, thieving, beautiful, ugly (they have a right to be happy, too!) – I loved them all, and I still do, even though my old age took away my former youthful vigour.
I must say that my tastes have remained the same, if but for a slight preference for the younger, rather than the mature.
Sure, women paid me back with love, and sometimes – it might have happened some twenty times – with a gift that put me out of the game for several weeks, tended to by the medic. What all this forced rest did to me is to make me even lustier for what was to come.
When I only think back to Balletti, Tintoretta, Teresa, Ninetta, Lucrezia, Caterina, Barberina, Agata, my darling M. M. Those round, fresh breasts, the rustle of their garments, their skirts falling off, the powder, and that magical vellus, custodian of treasure supreme.
Thinking of certain adventures, some verses by the great poet Giorgio Baffo come immediately to mind, a friend of my father’s and the last scion of a patrician family. I owe him my life. When I was eight, he convinced my mother to take me to Padova to see a famous physician, Macop, who saved me from certain death caused by a nasty, extended bleeding.
Thank you, dear Giorgio Baffo, prurient poet, awesome and great. Your poems, lewd though they may be, will keep your name alive. The state’s inquisitors, so moralistic in their zeal, will contribute to your fame. By persecuting your art, they will make it even more precious, and everybody will read it. I know that since I was a child, you recognized I could be your heir, and I am proud to call you, even now that you’re no longer with us, a devout admirer and sincere friend.
Everywhere I went, I left a piece of me. Venice, though, with its fog, its canals, its alleys, always attracted and bewitched me, even though I was forced by an unjust verdict to stay away for over eighteen years.
Back to my life story: I never stopped for an instant. I always tried to do something, and I kept changing to follow my inclinations. As a young man, I took law classes at Padova and read law. I started a career in the clergy, I served in Venice’s army, I was a legate to Constantinople, I was a private diplomat for the king of France, I was a professional gambler, I knew how to make good fortune smile at me, I ran the Royal Lottery at the Military School in Paris, I taught, I ran a library, I wrote dramas, comedies, novels, essays, I translated the classics, I wrote of mathematics and numerology, I helped Lorenzo Da Ponte write the Don Giovanni for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
I am all this, and more.
A devout child of Venice and a world citizen, for love and circumstances, I lived in Venice, the Hague, Rotterdam, Paris, Lyon, Munich, Augsburg, Genoa, Leghorn, Florence, Pisa, Rome, Naples, Turin, Pavia, Milan, London, Berlin, Riga, Petrograd, Moscow, Warsaw, Dresden, Leipzig, Prague, Mainz, Cologne, Spa, Liège, Toledo, Saragossa, Sagunto, Valencia, Barcelona, Perpignan, Nimes, Aix-en-Provence, Lugano, Trieste, Ancona, Gorizia, Udine, Bolzano, Frankfurt, Aachen. In all these cities, I was acquainted with their most prominent citizens, the noblest palaces, the filthiest inns, the sleaziest brothels, the shiniest theatres, the whorehouses, the luxury hotels. I talked with porters, with kings and queens, with maids, with known swindlers, with cardinals, and with some of the finest minds of the century, like mathematician d’Alembert, count Algarotti, poet Metastasio, archaeologist Winckelmann.
Everywhere I went, I left a piece of me. Venice, though, with its fog, its canals, its alleys, always attracted and bewitched me, even though I was forced by an unjust verdict to stay away for over eighteen years.
But besides all troubles, my life has been wonderful. If I were to tell my several grandchildren – both legitimate and illegitimate, including the many I have never met – all the stories that have happened to me over these sixty years – by the time I’d finish they’d be adults in their own right!
I see you’re being served lunch, now, and I shall let you enjoy it in peace.
I will leave now and go entertain countess Ottoboni, whom I had promised to play cards with. I wonder what card she’ll let me draw…
