Giacomo Casanova

Born to Venetian actors on 2 April 1725, Casanova studied law at Padua and took minor orders in the Catholic Church before abandoning both for a life of gambling, violin-playing, and cultivated deceit. He extracted money from aristocrats by claiming mastery of alchemy and the occult, escaped from the Piombi prison after the Council of Ten jailed him for offenses against religion and morals, and later persuaded French authorities to establish a state lottery. Styling himself Chevalier de Seingalt and occasionally Baron of Farussi, he traveled Europe meeting Voltaire, Goethe, and Mozart, his sexual affairs with women stretching from adolescence into old age. Exiled twice from Venice, he began writing in French and ended his days as a librarian at Dux Castle in Bohemia, where he completed Histoire de ma vie - a posthumously published memoir now regarded as an unmatched record of 18th-century social life. He died there on 4 June 1798.