Italian · 1725–1798
Giacomo Casanova was born in Venice in 1725 and died in Dux, Bohemia, in 1798. He studied law at Padua, worked briefly in the church, and served as a soldier and a violinist before making a living as a gambler, diplomat, writer and adventurer. In 1755 the Venetian Inquisition imprisoned him in the Leads, the cells under the roof of the Doges' Palace, and in 1756 he escaped. He then travelled through France, Germany, Russia, Spain and England, and helped start a state lottery in Paris. He met Voltaire, Frederick the Great and Catherine the Great. In his last years he served as librarian to Count Waldstein at Dux castle. There he wrote Histoire de ma vie, a long memoir in French, which covers his life to about 1774. It is a major source on daily life, travel and manners in eighteenth-century Europe. The text was first published in expurgated form after his death, and the original manuscript appeared in full only in the 1960s. His name has become a byword for the seducer.