Casanova
The most famous Venetian libertine was Casanova, the son of a Venetian actor and a shoemaker’s daughter. As he stated in his autobiography, “My Life and Adventures“. Casanova’s purpose was simply pleasure, and his greatest pleasure was women conquers.
Like many libertines, Casanova also dabbled in magic and the occult, and this proved to be his undoing. Denunciations were issued from many quarters, his accusers calling him a “violater” and a “diabolist”. The police began to watch him, and he was arrested. He was taken by barge in front of the court, after the trial he was escorted from the Doge Palace, over the bridge of sighs, to the prisons “PIOMBI”. For fifteen months Casanova remained in the PIOMBI, working the whole time on his escape. He escaped onto the sloping roof of the Doge Palace, slippery with night mists and he fled across St Mark Square to a Gondola, in which he made his escape.
If we are to believe his memoirs, Casanova led the life of a libertine twelve months of the year; the rest of the population had to be content with only the six-month Carnival.
