Giacomo Casanova

Italian · 1725 to 1798

Born Giacomo Girolamo Casanova in Venice on 2 April 1725, he was the eldest of six children of the Venetian actress Zanetta Farussi and the dancer Gaetano Casanova, raised mostly by his grandmother Marzia Baldissera while his parents toured the European theatres. His father died when he was eight. At twelve he entered the University of Padua, graduating in law at seventeen, a discipline for which he later professed an unconquerable aversion. After short, scandal-ridden spells as a seminarian, abbe, military officer in Corfu, and violinist at the San Samuele Theater, he saved a Venetian senator's life in a gondola and became the protege of the Bragadin household. He was arrested by the Venetian Council of Ten in 1755 for offences against religion and morals and confined to the Piombi prison beneath the Doge's Palace, escaping through the lead-lined roof in October 1756, the first man known to have done so. Over the next two decades he wandered Europe as gambler, alchemist, spy, and writer, founding the French state lottery, meeting Voltaire, Goethe, and Mozart, and leaving a trail of liaisons that would make his name a byword for the seducer. From 1785 he lived as librarian to Count Waldstein at Dux Castle in Bohemia, where in twelve folio volumes of French he wrote the Histoire de ma vie, a portrait of eighteenth-century Europe no other memoir would equal, breaking off mid-sentence in 1774. He was prouder of his Piombi escape than of any of his loves. He died at Dux on 4 June 1798, aged seventy-three; the manuscript circulated in bowdlerised translation until the unexpurgated French text appeared in 1960.