History of My Life

Giacomo Casanova, Chevalier de Seingalt (1725–98), is now known mainly for seductions, and there are plenty of these, vividly described, in his memoirs. But Casanova was more than an amorist. In his time he was diplomat, acolyte, author, traveller, prisoner, magician, musician, con artist, gambler and all purpose charlatan. He financed business projects, organized lotteries, wrote opera libretti and dabbled in high politics. His dizzying social life included dukes and cardinals, monks, tramps, scholars and courtesans. Above all, he was an autobiographer of enduring brilliance and subtlety who left behind him what may claim to be the most remarkable confession ever written. A Venetian who explored to the full all the possibilities his native city offered by way of love and adventure, Casanova was eventually imprisoned in the notorious attics of the Doge’s Palace, but escaped from gaol and embarked on the travels which took him across Europe. In Moscow and London, Madrid, Berlin and Constantinople, he met the celebrities of the time – Catherine the Great, Voltaire, Louis XV, Rousseau – and recorded his encounters in the memoirs he wrote at the end of his life in a remote Bohemian castle. These memoirs are by turns subtle, touching, thrilling, wonderfully comic and quite irresistible. Although the present edition includes just over one third of Casanova’s enormous (though unfinished) book, it contains all his major adventures and his greatest affairs of the heart.