Background
Giacomo Casanova was born on April 2, 1725 in Venice, Republic of Venice (now Italy); the first child of an actor, Gaetano Casanova, and actress, Zanetta Farussi.
(Love can be surprising. Love can be heartbreaking. Love c...)
Love can be surprising. Love can be heartbreaking. Love can be an art. But love is the singular emotion that all humans rely on most . . . and crave endlessly, no matter what the cost. United by this theme of love, the nine titles in the Penguin Great Loves collection include tales of blissful and all-encompassing, doomed and tragic, erotic and absurd, seductive and adulterous, innocent and murderous love. A deeply moving addition to the Penguin Great Ideas and Great Journeys series, each gorgeously packaged book will challenge all expectations of love while celebrating the beauty of its existence. All books in this series: Cures for Love Doomed Love The Eaten Heart First Love Forbidden Fruit The Kreutzer Sonata A Mere Interlude Of Mistresses, Tigresses and Other Conquests The SeducerÂ's Diary
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0141034831/?tag=2022091-20
(Seducer, gambler, necromancer, swindler, swashbuckler, po...)
Seducer, gambler, necromancer, swindler, swashbuckler, poet, self-made gentleman, bon vivant, Giacomo Casanova was not only the most notorious lover of the Western world, but a supreme story teller. He lived a life stranger than most fictions, and the tale of his own adventures is his most compelling story, and one that remained unfinished at the time of his death. This new selection contains all the highlights of Casanova's life: his youth in Venice as a precocious ecclesiastic; his dabbling in the occult; his imprisonment and thrilling escape; and his amorous conquests, ranging from noblewomen to nuns.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0140439153/?tag=2022091-20
(A series of adventures wilder and more fantastic than the...)
A series of adventures wilder and more fantastic than the wildest of romances, written down with the exactitude of a business diary; a view of men and cities from Naples to Berlin, from Madrid and London to Constantinople and St. Petersburg; the 'vie intime' of the eighteenth century depicted by a man, who to-day sat with cardinals and saluted crowned heads, and tomorrow lurked in dens of profligacy and crime; a book of confessions penned without reticence and without penitence; a record of forty years of "occult" charlatanism; a collection of tales of successful imposture, of 'bonnes fortunes', of marvellous escapes, of transcendent audacity, told with the humour of Smollett and the delicate wit of Voltaire. Who is there interested in men and letters, and in the life of the past, who would not cry, "Where can such a book as this be found?" Yet the above catalogue is but a brief outline, a bare and meager summary, of the book known as "THE MEMOIRS OF CASANOVA"; a work absolutely unique in literature. He who opens these wonderful pages is as one who sits in a theatre and looks across the gloom, not on a stage-play, but on another and a vanished world. Giacomo Casanova (1725-1798) was an Italian adventurer and author from the Republic of Venice. He often signed his works Jacques Casanova de Seingalt after he began writing in French following his second exile from Venice. He has become so famous for his often complicated and elaborate affairs with women that his name is now synonymous with "womanizer". He associated with European royalty, popes and cardinals, along with luminaries such as Benjamin Franklin, Voltaire, Goethe, and Mozart.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07353YSJS/?tag=2022091-20
Giacomo Casanova was born on April 2, 1725 in Venice, Republic of Venice (now Italy); the first child of an actor, Gaetano Casanova, and actress, Zanetta Farussi.
He set out to play the comedy of life with a short role as an ecclesiastic but was expelled from the seminary in 1743.
He found refuge in Rome with Cardinal Acquaviva, the first of his many powerful protectors. By 1745 he had returned to Venice, where he practiced magic. Forced to flee prosecution for engaging in the black arts, Casanova drifted from city to city. In Lyons in 1750 he joined the Free Masons, an allegiance that gave him support in the noble, free thinking circles of cosmopolitan Europe. Gambling, profiteering, and amorous activities marked his first stay in Paris (1750 - 1753). His luck held until 1755, when he was imprisoned in Venice for "black magic, licentiousness, and atheism. " His spectacular escape is chronicled in the only portion of his memoirs to appear during his lifetime (1788). The years 1756-1763 brought Casanova his most brilliant successes in a society dedicated to games of love and chance. Voltaire, whom he met briefly, judged him to be a "mixture of science and imposture, " a suspect combination which nevertheless brought Casanova in contact with Frederick II and Catherine the Great. Casanova himself divided his life into "three acts of a comedy. " The second, which he thought of as lasting from 1763 to 1783, was less droll than the first. Protectors were less willing, and as the adventurer's brilliance faded, his charlatanism became more evident. From 1774 to 1782 Casanova added to his repertoire the role of "secret agent" for the Republic of Venice, but he was less a spy than an informer. Again obliged to leave Venice, Casanova began the third act of his comedy penniless and on the road. But in 1785 he gained the protection of the Count of Waldstein, in whose château at Dux (Bohemia) he stayed until his death in 1798. There he wrote his celebrated History of My Life, ending with the events of 1774, after which he had "only sad things to tell. " Written in sometimes imperfect French, this work moves rapidly and frankly through vast amounts of personal and social detail. Besides tales of the 122 women whose favors he claims to have enjoyed, Casanova offers a chronicle of social extravagance and decline and a vision of Europe as complex and colorful as the bawdy, elegant, naively rational, desperately pretentious, and comic figure of "Seingalt" himself. Casanova's writings also include miscellaneous gallant verse, several treatises on mathematics, a three-volume refutation of Amelot de la Houssaye's history of Venetian government (1769), a translation of the Iliad (1775), and a five-volume novel of fantastic adventure to the center of the earth, Icosameron (1788).
(A series of adventures wilder and more fantastic than the...)
(Seducer, gambler, necromancer, swindler, swashbuckler, po...)
(Love can be surprising. Love can be heartbreaking. Love c...)