It is obvious that the trial of Casanova is the most studied of those passed at the Palazzo delle Prigioni, and those who have read the original papers agree to say that the charges against him did not correspond to real crimes (with the exception perhaps of only one), but rather to “questions about his person and his lifestyle”.
The first accusation was that of being a Freemason, completely true even if the only problem could consist in the fact that at the time it was a secret society, which is why, on the other hand, it was so trendy to be part of it. The second accusation was that of being addicted to alchemy and magical practices, to which he was actually addicted and for which he was even considered skilled. The third accusation was perhaps the only real crime, that is, an organized fraud in the shape of a raffle/lottery with the sole purpose of extracting money from the gullible. The biggest accusation was the fourth as “libertinage”, fully confirmed by his autobiography which describes his existence without leaving anything to the imagination; the book, however, has the merit of describing an entire society of libertines, which is why it is said that in Venice there were many who followed a similar lifestyle, including women. The case of Casanova, unfortunately, has to do with an exuberant personality, which ended up offending the French ambassador in Venice for his relationship with the same woman, a question that aroused annoyance even in the Venetian political circles who preferred to do way to “get out of the way” a character now too exposed and therefore embarrassing. For this he was assigned the maximum penalty for all the disputed charges, condemning him to Piombi, the hardest cell.
