Giacomo Casanova
Giovanni Giacomo Casanova was born in Venice in 1725 to actress Zanetta Farussi, wife of actor Gaetano Giuseppe Casanova.Giacomo was the first of six children.Because of his mother's profession, many have suspected that some or all of these were fathered by men other than her husband. Casanova himself suspected his biological father to have been Michele Grimani, who was a member of the patrician family that owned the San Samuele theatre where Zanetta and Gaetano had worked; however, in his autobiography he did not mention this.
His father died when he was eight. His mother, with six children to feed, kept her five youngest at home and sent Casanova to boarding school in Padua on his ninth birthday, supposedly for the good of his health. She returned to Venice; Casanova would not see her again for a year. She was able to afford boarding school because before Gaetano died in 1733 he had appealed to the Grimanis to take care of his family. At boarding school he showed great academic promise and quickly became his teacher's favourite. He was naturally quick-witted, with an intense appetite for knowledge and a perpetually inquisitive mind. It was also here that he came into contact with the opposite sex for the first time when his teacher's younger sister apparently masturbated him at the age of eleven. At the age of sixteen he lost his virginity in the arms of two sisters who, according to his account, threw themselves at him. Also at age sixteen, he obtained his doctorate in Law from the University of Padua, where he had studied moral philosophy, chemistry, mathematics, and law. He was keenly interested in medicine and later in life regretted not having made a career out of it, although he showed himself to be an instinctively good amateur physician.
In 1740 Casanova was back in Venice where he started his clerical law career in the church as an abbé. By now he had become something of a dandy — tall and dark, his long hair powdered, scented, and elaborately curled. He quickly ingratiated himself (something he was to do all his life) with a 76-year old Venetian senator, Alvise Gasparo Malipiero, the owner of Palazzo Malipiero. Malipiero moved in the best circles and taught young Casanova a great deal about good food and wine and how to behave in society. He never spent much time on his church career, due to his restless nature and preoccupation with sex.
His career in the church was short and tainted by scandals. After he left the church, he bought a commission to become a low ranking military officer for the Republic of Venice, and went to Constantinople after which he was stationed a short period on Corfu. He found his advancement too slow and boring and soon abandoned his military career. Back in Venice, he became a violinist in the San Samuele theatre, which was still owned by Grimani. At the age of 21, he saved the life of a Venetian nobleman from the Bragadin family, who became his life-long patron and raised Casanova to the status of a wealthy gentleman. Casanova left Venice in 1748, due to another scandal, this time about a freshly buried corpse dug up in order to play a practical joke — the victim went into a coma, never to recover — and charges of rape against a young girl, of which he was later acquitted.
Having spent time in Paris, Dresden, Prague, and Vienna, he returned to his home town of Venice in 1753. In July 1755, at age thirty, he was arrested and convicted for his interest in magic (witchcraft) by the Inquisitori di Stato in Venice, and imprisoned in "I piombi" ("The Leads"), a famous prison attached to the Doge's palace. Casanova was sentenced to five years but was informed of neither trial nor sentence. Casanova hints at knowing his crime, dismisses it, and does not openly acknowledge it in his memoirs. On the first of November 1756, he escaped from what was one of the most secure prisons of his time; no inmate before Casanova had successfully escaped.
During his lifetime, Casanova traveled extensively over Europe and managed to visit all its capitals, being expelled from many due to various scandals. In 1766, he was expelled from Warsaw due to a pistol duel with Count Colonel Franciszek Ksawery Branicki over an Italian actress, a ladyfriend of theirs. Both were wounded. It was one of more than a few duels Casanova would fight in his life.
Casanova was permitted to return to Venice in 1774 after eighteen years' exile, but was expelled again in 1783 after writing a vicious satire poking fun at Venetian nobility; in it he made his only public statement that Grimani was his true father.
Judith Summers' biography of Casanova paints a different picture of him than the traditional one. She describes how he was attracted to strong-minded women who presented him with an intellectual as well as a romantic challenge. He did not pursue sex for its own sake and if he had nothing to say to a woman, rarely wanted to sleep with her. She also puts forward the theory that among his 200 plus lovers were many women who took advantage of his kindness, generosity, and vulnerability.
A story to which there is more than seems at first glance is the gorgeous nun who slipped Casanova a note suggesting he meet her in private. Casanova waxed lyrical about tasting the forbidden fruit and trespassing on the rights of the omnipotent husband. However, it transpired that the nun, M.M, was a sexual predator beholden to François de Bernis, the French ambassador, who was fully complicit of the seduction of Casanova and who most likely observed their first tryst from a secret chamber. Casanova fell deeply in love with M.M; however, she always put the ambassador first and outdid Casanova in her sexual extremism by seducing his female fourteen-year-old former lover, first into a three-in-a-bed romp including herself and Casanova, and then with the ambassador. The debauchery of this young girl he had loved sickened Casanova, but he was so in love he colluded.
Nor was the nun the only one to take advantage of Casanova's nature. The greatest love of his life, Henriette, as he called her (her real name was most likely Adelaide de Gueidan), took advantage of him to secure passage to Parma, was ensconced in the finest accommodation at his expense, then abandoned him with the instruction that if they were to meet in future he was not to acknowledge that he had known her. That she was on the run from a husband who intended her for a convent due to her infidelity and that Casanova had first encountered her in the arms of a Hungarian soldier she had enlisted to assist her passage to Parma did not seem to prepare him for the outcome. Though 'adopted' by a rich Venetian senator whose life he had saved, and with a small private income, Casanova was by no means rich and the maids and language teachers he had hired for Henriette had decimated his finances. He sought solace in sex in Paris, at one point keeping twenty lovers in twenty apartments.
The most devastating blow was yet to come, however. Marianne de Charpillon was a fresh-faced courtesan of sixteen being touted around London by her family in the hope of finding a suitor rich enough to support them all. With only a basic grasp of English and — it would seem — of the wiles of women, Casanova was captivated by the French-speaking prostitute. She teased, tormented, and tantalised him, being set up in a house in Chelsea along the way yet still not succumbing to his physical advances. On one occasion she curled up into a ball making penetration impossible and driving the furiously frustrated Casanova almost to rape. Yet, when he would attempt to distance himself from her, she pursued, lavishing gifts on him. He even forgave her indiscretions: upon catching her in flagrante with her male hairdresser, he smashed the house up before being reduced to a penitent submissive in a matter of minutes by this teenager, despite being a supposedly worldly man in his thirties. Ultimately she ruined his confidence in women and in himself, which goes some way towards explaining why the man whose name would become synonymous with lovers spent the last sixteen years of his life as a broken man working as a librarian in a remote corner of Bohemia.
It is alleged that his only revenge on Marianne de Charpillon before fleeing London was to buy a parrot, teach it to say "Charpillon is a greater whore than her mother!", and resell the parrot in the market.
Unusual for his time, Casanova was egalitarian towards the sexes.He accepted women as his equals and was non-judgmental about their behaviour, according them the same status to do as they wished as he did men.
Quotations
"I am writing My Life to laugh at myself, and I am succeeding."
Source : www.wikipedia.org
