Venetian adventurer and writer (1725–1798)
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His name became synonymous with seduction, but the real legacy is the autobiography: a 3,800-page chronicle of 18th-century Europe written in French exile, mapping card tables, prison escapes, and bedrooms with the precision of an anthropologist who happened to be the subject.
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 sex…
Sourced, dated quotes from Giacomo Casanova
Great God, and you witnesses of my death, I have lived as a philosopher, and I die as a Christian.
I will begin with this confession: whatever I have done in the course of my life, whether it be good or evil, has been done freely; I am a free agent.
Man is free; yet we must not suppose that he is at liberty to do everything he pleases, for he becomes a slave the moment he allows his actions to be ruled by passion.
I have written the history of my life, and I have a perfect right to do so; but am I wise in throwing it before a public of which I know nothing but evil?
An ancient author tells us somewhere, with the tone of a pedagogue, if you have not done anything worthy of being recorded, at least write something worthy of being read.
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