Compared to the average fops and dandies of the era, Casanova was a striking physical presence—over six feet tall, trim and handsome, with a swarthy complexion and, as one scholar puts it, “greedy lips.” The ultimate self-made man, he was the son of two poor actors who gave himself the noble-sounding title “Chevalier de Seingalt,” and went on to use his wit, charm, and joie de vivre to make himself a sought-after companion in the highest courts of Europe. What many don’t realize today is that, along with his amorous achievements, Casanova’s intellectual versatility puts the likes of Hugh Hefner to shame. Apart from being a theater director, a violin virtuoso, and a secret agent, he translated the Iliad and created the French lottery system. He debated with Voltaire, Goethe, Catherine the Great, and Ben Franklin, and he almost certainly worked with Mozart on the libretto of Don Giovanni. Just for good measure, he knocked out a history of Poland, several mathematical treatises, and a protofeminist pamphlet. But it was his rollicking sex memoir, written when he was in his sixties, that ensured his immortality.
The innocuously named Story of My Life is a hilarious encyclopedia of eighteenth-century sin. It would also, I hoped, serve as my guidebook to Venice’s secrets. Although an inveterate traveler, Casanova was obsessed with his home city, and the memoir teems with unusual asides and insights. Being a serious fan of Giacomo, I hoped that if I followed his path, I might be connected, if only momentarily, to the city’s past magic—a notoriously difficult feat. It has become a ritual for travelers to mourn Venice, whose fall from grace since Casanova’s day is more extreme than that of any other place in Europe.
The Venetian historian Claudio dell’Orso argues in Erotic Venice that the closure of the city’s brothels in 1958 (following Paris’s lead) symbolized the decline of its traditional life. By the 1970s, local artisans were departing to live on the mainland, leaving Venice a hollowed-out shell. “Desire does not live in Venice any more,” he lamented in 1996. “In fact even Venice, that Venice, no longer exists.” Today, a mere sixty thousand permanent residents (about a quarter of the eighteenth-century population) confront the arrival of 20 million annual visitors. Even Italians regard Venice as a lost cause, where honeymooners are ripped off by gondoliers and end up arguing over maps. Its sensual reputation hangs by the barest of commercial threads. In 2006, enterprising locals opened an Erotic Museum but it failed dismally and closed after six months.
And yet, the fact remains that no other city in Europe is so physically intact. A few guard railings have been installed on the canals, and the gondolas are no longer crowned with curtained leather booths, where lovers could withdraw for privacy as they floated through the city. But otherwise, Venice looks much the same as it did when Casanova saw M.M. shed her nun’s habit. The absence of automobiles gives Venice the potential for imaginative historic wandering—outside of tourist hours, that is. If you venture out very early or very late, the only noise in many corners can still be the gentle lapping of water, and Giacomo himself might spring from a doorway at any moment.
NUNS AND LOVERS
Approaching Venice is a time-honored spectacle, skimming over the ocean with nothing but a few mooring poles and seabirds to announce your arrival. Passengers still emerge excitedly from the railway station directly onto the Grand Canal, thick with watercraft like a painting at the Met come to life. The charm frays a little when the blown-glass vendors swoop in or you try to find a bathroom and there are forty people waiting for a single stall. But a shady café overlooks the hubbub, so in our case, we regrouped over cappuccino and bottled orange juice. In the heat of optimism, I decided that our irascible Bangladeshi waiter only proved that Venice is still the gateway to the East.
“Bellissimo, no?” I raved, waving my arms out over the water traffic. “Sogniamo colle occhi aperti!”
“What the heck?” Henry said, looking at me as if I’d finally lost it. He’d just gotten used to ordering soda in French.
“We’re dreaming with our eyes open!”
Fearing the worst, Les had patiently held off asking where we might be staying in Venice. I pulled out a scrap of paper that had the address of a certain Signor Luca. Before I could conjure visions of randy nuns, I had some business to transact.
“You guys stay put for a few minutes.”
It had been quite a stretch to find a luxury casino worthy of Casanova on our budget. For weeks, the only places I found were dark shoeboxes in remote ghettos for astronomical sums. Finally, I’d come across una offerta dell’ultimo minuto, “a last minute special,” that looked suspiciously attractive. All I had to do was bring $2,000 in cash to this fellow Signor Luca, and the keys to a pleasure dome worthy of Kublai Khan would be handed over. So what if I’d be paying off this trip until I was ninety-five? There’s something about Venice that makes you throw logic to the winds.
“You’re serious?” Les asked, as I slipped into the crowds. “They’ve probably been running this scam since 1750!”
An illicit atmosphere certainly endures in Venice. All those towering facades promise that mysterious worlds are still contained behind closed doors. Even on the busiest canals, Venetians will appear for just a moment high on their balcony or in their lavish bedrooms before velvet curtains are drawn tight. Signor Luca’s office, I had to admit, looked like a drug-dealer’s front in Uzbekistan. There were three souvenir T-shirts hanging in the window and a pair of flip-flops. The signor himself was a corpulent, goateed fellow in dark glasses, sipping macchiato from a teacup. He took my cash, slowly counted out the crisp bills, then dangled three keys on a ring before me.
I had to ask why the apartment was so discounted.
“August is low season in Venice,” he wheezed. “Very low season.” He gestured weakly at the window. “The heat. The humidity. The people. But you will enjoy it.”
I shuffled out, hoping Signor Luca wasn’t about to pack up his “office” and disappear the moment I turned the corner.
Those mysterious Venetians, we soon found, were not quite as timid as rumor held. After wrestling our luggage onto a ferry, a creaking steamer out of Joseph Conrad, one of the quirky old “characters” decided to chew me out. “Foreigners shouldn’t be allowed to bring luggage on public ferries!” he orated to the other passengers, sweat pouring down his face. “They should be forced to take a water taxi!” (This would have amounted to $200 for a five-minute ride.) “What do they expect coming here like this …?” The other Venetians, mostly women with shopping bags returning from the markets, rolled their eyes at him. “So much talking!” one matron scoffed. “He’s in love with the sound of his own voice!” Others chimed in on an animated discussion of the iniquities of public transport the world over. Soon we, too, were commiserating and gesticulating as if we were on a New York bus. Quite a change from Switzerland, where you have to almost pull a revolver to make someone talk to you.
Henry and Sam, meanwhile, were mesmerized by the reflections on the canals. A whole city where the streets were made of water? This was worth seeing.
Venetian street addresses haven’t been updated since the eighteenth century. Signor Luca had made me a helpful drawing of what our new home looked like, but it still involved impromptu explorations of the canals behind the Piazza San Marco.
“Is this it?” Henry asked, dubiously. I held up the drawing.
“I think so …”
“It looks like a prison.”
A defensive iron grate opened onto a tiny courtyard, where sacks of garbage were piled up like sandbags at a bomb shelter. The dark vestibule smelled powerfully of bilge water. It seemed as if a canal was flowing just beneath our feet. We crept up cracked marble stairs in darkness, with the prospect of a Coleridgean pleasure dome more remote with every step. But once I’d wrestled open the door, I was flooded with relief. The place was not bad, not bad at all. In fact, it was vast. The master bedroom had twenty-foot ceilings and a four-poster bed. Corridors went off at strange angles to reveal endless extra bedrooms, all with antique furniture decorated with hunting s
cenes. The hallway was a gallery of original sketches by the owner’s friend, Hugo Pratt, creator of a graphic novel series called Corto Maltese, about a sailor-adventurer in the early 1900s. The lush ink illustrations revealed Venice’s dark taverns where buxom gypsy girls worked the bar and toothless sailors sharpened their knives, plotting kidnap and mutiny.
It was like something out of a Visconti movie, where a fallen aristocratic family drifts along in frayed splendor. Casanova might have demanded a few more chaises longues, but Tom Ripley would surely have approved.
Les was never happier. Henry and Sam had their own room for the first time in months, and the kitchen overlooked a Renaissance courtyard.
“I’m like a bird,” she said. “If you want to get me in the mood, I need everyone to be fed and the laundry to be done.”
It was a promising start for channeling Venice’s most famous son.
THE RAKE’S PROGRESS
Casanova loved that Venice was saturated with erotic historical reference, and today every corner still evokes an anecdote. We crossed the Ponte delle Tette, the Bridge of Breasts, where Venetian puttane were once permitted to lounge with their dresses open in order to drum up business. (Laws against female nudity were relaxed in the 1400s when a series of scandals made it clear that homosexuality was rife.) We located the original door of an eighteenth-century brothel called Scalon, still bristling with iron spikes designed to deter roustabouts from breaking it down with their shoulders. Eating pizza in front of the Church of San Barnaba, I could recount how, in 1443, Enrico Dolfin, a young noble, was caught under the church organ with a prostitute named Margarita, and so prosecuted for committing a “crime against God.” A short stroll away was the Church of Santa Maria Formosa, dedicated to the “shapely” Virgin Mary, whose full figure so aroused a Venetian bishop when she appeared to him in a vision that he plunged into a spiral of guilt. And on a more contemporary note, we called at the villa of the voracious American heiress Peggy Guggenheim, whose canalside terrace is graced with Marino Marini’s statue “The Angel of the City,” a naked man on horseback with an erection. In the 1950s, she would apparently unscrew the phallus and present it to whichever male visitor she intended to bed that night. Later in life, when asked by a journalist how many husbands she’d had, she replied, “Mine, or other people’s?”
But as for Casanova’s physical presence, there is only one official memorial in all of Venice—a hard-to-spot plaque on the fissure-like Calle della Commedia, Comedy Street, in the San Samuele district, where he was born and spent his childhood. It’s as if the Venetians themselves are ashamed of his wastrel ways; nobody is even quite sure in which house he was born. Although he developed a superhuman constitution, Giacomo was a surprisingly frail, simpering child, whose permanent nosebleed made it seem unlikely that he would survive. His father died when he was eight years old, and Casanova nurtured an obsession with his mother, a beautiful, self-absorbed actress who was surrounded by male admirers and who regularly left her children to tour the theaters of Europe. (His was an early case of mammismo, the mother-worship that Italian psychiatrists have recently denounced as the curse of the country’s males.) Around the corner stands the modest Church of San Samuele, where the teenage Casanova trained, improbably enough, for the priesthood. He even had the top of his head shaved in the clerical tonsure—a seriously unsexy look for us today, but according to his own account, when he gave his first sermon, the money collection tray included feverish love letters from female parishioners.
The only memorial to Casanova in Venice, on the corner with Calle della Commedia, the street of his birth.
By his late teens, Casanova had tossed in the cowl and fallen in with a clique of seven loutish friends, who ran around Venice at night playing pranks on gondoliers. I prowled the old red-light district around the Rialto markets to find Alle Spade, the last surviving bácaro, or bar, that Casanova frequented. Hidden from the noonday sun, its dark wooden interior was strangely devoid of customers. I nibbled cicchetti, dried cod snacks on crackers, while the jowly owner informed me in oft-rehearsed tones that “Casanova was the greatest chiavatore (fucker) who ever lived.” No plaque would dare to recount the most notorious episode to occur in Alle Spade, which began when Casanova’s gang spotted three men drinking with a pretty girl and decided to play a hoax. The leader, a young patrician, convinced the drinkers that he was an agent of the ruling Council of Ten and that they were under arrest. The quaking trio, who even included the girl’s husband, were then spirited to a remote island and stranded for the night. The girl, however, was spirited upstairs to the comfortable, firelit salon of Alle Spade, plied with good wine and food, and informed that if she offered her favors, she would win leniency from the council for her captive husband. First, the leader had his way with her. “She was surprised when I presented myself second,” Casanova notes. “By the time she saw the third … she had no more doubt that her happy fate promised her all the members of our band.” The eight friends then escorted the girl home. “We had to laugh after she thanked us as frankly and sincerely as possible,” Casanova notes of this quaint jest.
From Alle Spade, I tracked down the Palazzo Bragadin, a mansion opposite the site of Marco Polo’s house, which was the scene of a lucky break in Casanova’s life. At age twenty-one, he recounts in his memoir, he was making a bare living as a violinist when he noticed an elderly gentleman drop a letter after a high society ball. The grateful old man offered Casanova a ride home in his private gondola, only to be seized en route by an apoplectic fit. Casanova remained overnight, nursing him back to health and keeping away the doctors who advocated leeches and bloodletting. The victim turned out to be a powerful senator, Don Matteo Bragadin, who on his recovery treated Casanova like his adopted son. He gave him a room in his palazzo, a gondola, and an allowance of ten sequins a month, which instantly vaulted Casanova from the rank of impoverished rascal to young man-about-town. (In Erotic Venice, the author Dell’Orso convincingly argues that this meeting was hardly as innocent as Casanova claims, for a “dropped letter” was a standard ruse for wealthy Venetian men to pick up younger men. Casanova was showered with gifts not because Bragadin was a kind-hearted soul, but because he was Bragadin’s boy toy). Outside the palazzo, two Franciscan friars in brown robes were sitting on the steps with their bag lunch and Evian water. I was later impressed to learn that the building had just been purchased by none other than Pierre Cardin, who was born and raised in Venice before moving to Paris. Real estate agents must have him pegged.
With Don Bragadin’s assistance, Casanova came into his own, winning fortunes in the gambling houses, spending them on extravagant fashions, and seducing the upper-class women of Venice. But to the end of his life, he regarded his romance with the frolicsome nun M.M. as the most magical of his many romances. The site of her convent, Santa Maria degli Angeli, lies at the tranquil tip of Murano Island, which was even in the eighteenth century given over to glassware production. (The factories were relocated here in the Middle Ages so as not to burn down the city.) A sign informed me that the convent had been demolished in 1823, although the church where Casanova and M.M. first met still stands. The historian Judith Summers learned that Marina Morosini, despite her passionate nature, never left the nunnery and ended her days as the abbess. C.C., however, managed to win her freedom, if only to marry a rich lawyer.
Entrance to the Palazzo Bragadin (on the right), Casanova’s home for many years, thanks to an indulgent Senator.
On Guidecca Island, another old convent called Convertite is more intact. It became notorious in 1561 when the rector was convicted of treating the four hundred nuns as his private harem. Appropriately enough, today it is a women’s prison, where the old canalside entrance still conjures the silent comings and goings by gondola.
Stay long enough and you realize that Venice still proceeds at an eighteenth-century pace. Life in our casino revolved around the tides and wind. Usually, a romantic breeze would waft through the curtains, but every now and t
hen, when the mercury rose, an unhealthy stew of humidity and bilge-water would settle over the city, permeating every corner, bringing armies of mosquitoes, and no doubt inspiring Signor Luca’s discount. In Thomas Mann’s day, wealthy Venetians would escape the heat and diseases at the beaches of the Lido. Thankfully, the pungent odors would seep away after a few hours.
Depending on the sounds emanating from the alley below, you never knew quite which century it was. At dawn, I’d be woken by the street cleaners, the whisk of their straw brushes interspersed with greetings at the top of their lungs, sounding as if they were inside our bedroom. By nightfall, once the tour groups went back to their cruise ships, the city became eerily silent. If anyone loitered too late in the street, Venetians would bellow oaths at them from their windows. Once, when a group of boozers refused to move on, someone upstairs emptied a whole pail of garbage on their heads. I made a mental note to try it on the clubbers back in New York.
Italian summer traditions began to rub off even on me. Our strolls into Casanova territory proceeded at a more leisurely pace, punctuated by pit stops for iced wine or cordial in the piazzas. The heat grew so intense that Henry and Sam would fill their baseball caps with water from the ancient cisterns and douse themselves, to the horror of passing Venetians, who dress in their Sunday best even to go to the grocer’s. The boys’ main pastime, however, was extracting as much as they could from us in the form of souvenir treasures. Stores are piled high with glass knickknacks in tutti-frutti colors, so the “candy contract” was replaced with the “Venetian crap contract.” Soon they were demanding fantasy chess sets and hand-crafted parchment notebooks. One day, we stumbled across Ca’Macana, the oldest mask store in Venice, which had designed the masks for the Hellfire Club vehicle Eyes Wide Shut, where Henry became besotted with a priceless cyborg mask, encrusted with hundreds of jewel-like electronic parts. With so many wealthy visitors to Venice, the sky is the limit. Another store offered a model apothecary’s desk, complete with miniscule glass bottles and leather-bound books, for a mere $4,000. We shuffled the poor boy away, muttering to himself in shock.
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