My favorite time was early morning, when I’d rise at dawn and creep out into the hushed city to enjoy the calm before the storm. By the waterfront, church bells drifted across the mirror-flat Lagoon. Only a few others were out—clusters of ferry captains, waiters setting up restaurant chairs, and vendors en route with their carts. I’d take a seat at one of the early-opening workers’ cafés and lose myself in Casanova’s memoirs—escapist literature for a family holiday, if ever there was.
THE OFFICE OF VENETIAN SECRETS
Casanova’s charmed life went awry one hot July morning in 1755, when, just after his thirtieth birthday, soldiers burst into his rooms at the Palazzo Bragadin. He had been singled out by the spies of the Venetian Inquisition as a con man, a card sharp, a magician, and a Freemason. He had also read aloud in a wineshop a blasphemous poem that “speaks both directly and indirectly of copulation.” But the real motive for his arrest, historians have speculated, was that he simply offended the wrong people. Casanova had won money from powerful men, had seduced their wives, and was recently courting a young lady sought by the Grand Inquisitor himself. The officers ransacking his quarters found plenty of suspicious evidence that could be used for trumped-up charges—banned books on astrology, kabbalah, and “how to converse with demons.” After Casanova had dressed (in protest, he chose to wear his finest clothes, “as if to attend a wedding”), he was spirited by gondola to the Doge’s Palace, the intimidating nerve center of the old republic. There was no trial. Venetian state policy was to tell prisoners neither the charges against them nor the length of their sentence. Instead, he was ushered across the Bridge of Sighs into I Piombi, the Leads—so called because the cells were directly under the lead roof—where he was condemned, for all he knew, to rot forever.
The most astonishing part of the story is that Casanova actually managed to escape from the Leads, the only inmate to ever do so, making him the toast of European courts. In recent years, historians have even delved into the republic’s archives to identify his cells and escape route in the off-limits attics of the Doge’s Palace.
The building is still one of Venice’s most famous, its gleaming Moorish facade overlooking the lagoon. When I entered, ticket vendors were lined up beside each other like some languid tribunal. The Doge’s Palace was huge, they explained, and only certain rooms were open to the public. Access to the rooftop cells was strictly limited because of the delicate nature of the physical space.
“You should have booked Il Itinerario Segreto.”
Of course! I clapped. The old Secret Itinerary …
Italians love their secret tours, which appeal to their sense of drama. There are several in Florence, where small groups are allowed into closed-off nooks of the Palazzo Vecchio and Uffizi by special permission. The downside is that it is often an enigma how to actually sign up for them. Here in the Doge’s Palace, I found the bureaucrat in charge of “special visits” sitting alone in the far corner of the room, a mass of frizzy black hair, painting her nails with blood-red polish. She was not encouraging.
The Secret Tour was very irregular. She sighed. Spaces fill up months in advance. Often it was cancellato, cancelled. The only tour that was planned anywhere in the near future was … here she ran her finger down a handwritten ledger … pieno. Full.
Could I get on a waiting list?
“Impossibile.”
Anyone higher up I could talk to?
“Nessuno.”
Pondering a bribe, I asked if any special fee could make things … easier?
“Niente.”
Finally, just to get rid of me, she wrote down the department within the Ministry of Culture that, on some cosmically remote level, masterminds the operation of Venice’s great historical sites. Perhaps I could go and plead my case in person.
It took me two hours to locate the office of the Foundation of the Civic Museums of Venice, which was unmarked in a nameless back alley. In August, it also appeared to be deserted. Up on the fourth floor, I finally found the sole remaining worker, a woman at her desk who was bathed in blinding light, reflected off the linoleum floor. The dottoressa wavered at my request—it was all rather unusual—but for a committed foreign scholar, a specialist in the life of Casanova, well, perhaps it could be done.…
When I rushed home to tell Les the good news, I found everyone in a state of exhaustion. They had gone out trying to buy groceries, become lost, and couldn’t find the way back. Les had gotten into an argument with a produce vendor, who was offended by her touching his tomatoes.
“You can buy any kind of jewel-encrusted mask in Venice twenty-four hours a day,” she railed, “but you can’t get toothpaste, toilet paper, or soap.”
It was true that living in the heart of the city had its practical difficulties. But after a couple of glasses of wine, looking out over the stately courtyard, we’d be dreaming about moving here with the boys for a year, me writing in the Macano Library, her sketching at the Accademia. We’d just have to bring our own groceries.
THE THEATER OF PAIN
Next morning at the Doge’s Palace, the woman with blood-red fingernails cracked her ledger for the Secret Tour. I was amazed to find that my name was now scribbled on the list, as if by kabbalistic magic. A handful of other invitees arrived one by one, all dignified and nattily dressed Italians, including a philosophy professor from Milan with his aged and fragile mother. I wondered whether she’d be able to stand the excitement.
The Palazzo Ducale, or Doge’s Palace, nerve-center of the Venetian Republic. Casanova was imprisoned in the attic cells.
At first, when our guide, Luciana, arrived, she seemed hardly Casanova’s type in her thick-rimmed reading glasses and all-enveloping white lab coat. She briskly handed out clothing stickers with SECRET ITINERARY stamped on them, then clomped up the Golden Staircase. But the costume was just a ruse. At the top of the stairs, she suddenly spun around, opened her coat, and dipped a hand down her plunging neckline to produce a key on a silver chain. This she inserted with a graceful, practiced motion into a keyhole, which opened a hidden panel in the bare wall. Luciana was decidedly more alluring now.
“Signori and signore,” she whispered huskily. “Welcome to the sanctum of the Venetian Republic. No bags are permitted inside. No photographs. No video.”
We nodded obediently. Luciana without her coat was transformed into Sophia Loren from one of her later films—say, The Priest’s Wife—as she beckoned us to enter. The rest of the milling visitors in the Doge’s Palace could only stare in slack-jawed envy as we stepped into the forbidden netherworld. As we passed, Luciana touched us each lightly on the hair, counting our numbers, then stepped inside to lock the door behind us, slipping the key with a smile back into her magnificent décolletage.
This was how a Secret Tour should start, I was thinking.
We ascended a dark stairway into corridors made from raw wooden planks, which began to shudder and sway. Soon it felt as though we were clambering about inside a galleon at sea. The route to Casanova’s cell ran via the original offices of the Republic’s top bureaucrats. In contrast to the baroque luxury of the rest of the palace, which was designed to impress foreign dignitaries with Venice’s wealth, they worked in no-frills cubicles with special hinges on the doors to create an airtight fit, in order to prevent eavesdropping. Next came the State Inquisitor’s Room and the Torture Room, where prisoners had their arms tied behind their backs, then were dropped from ropes.
It was through these gray corridors of power that the despondent Casanova was ushered after his arrest that steamy July morning in 1755. He knew that the attic cells of the Leads were reserved for long-term prisoners, and in his detailed account of the day in his memoir, he recalls that he was paralyzed with despair. His body felt “as if crushed by a wine press.” (The sentence was actually five years, but Casanova was not informed.)
Now as our little tour group approached Casanova’s rooftop cell, we became as hushed as if we were entering a chapel. A low doorway led into
a tight wooden box, about eight feet by eight, with a five foot high ceiling, all made of dark planks encrusted with metal studs. Near the door was a horseshoe-shaped device. Casanova recalls asking its purpose of his jailer, who gleefully told him it was a garroting machine, handy for quick executions. Then he was left alone, his only company rats, “the size of rabbits.”
“Alora,” Luciana breathed sadly as we crouched inside. “This was Casanova’s first cell. You can imagine what it was like for a man like him to be trapped here! He couldn’t even stand upright! He was attacked by fleas constantly. In the heat, he could do nothing but sit half naked, sweating. For a man who had devoted his life to sensual pleasure, this was like a living death. So he decided to escape, even though nobody had ever succeeded in doing so from the Doge’s Palace before.”
By eleven a.m. on our visit, the summer temperature in the Leads was already as “pestilential” as Casanova describes it. The perspiration was pouring off us, and we could hardly breathe. The philosopher’s elderly mother was looking shakier by the minute. I noticed that Luciana didn’t go into the more graphic details of Casanova’s suffering, which included an extreme case of hemorrhoids. (“A cruel affliction from which I never recovered.”) Instead, she enthusiastically related his Great Venetian Breakout.
Plan A, concocted in this very cell, was an embarrassing flop. Casanova got hold of an iron bolt left by some workmen and began to dig through the floorboards at night. He hid the damage beneath a carpet and armchair provided by his patron Don Bragadin, who had also sent some books and food to help Casanova survive. But agonizingly, after several months of painful labor, the guards decided to grant their most likable prisoner a favor and transfer him to a nicer cell. The tunnel was discovered. “It was just as well,” Luciana said. “Directly below is the Grand Inquisitor’s chamber. He was about to break through the ceiling, which would have destroyed a Tintoretto fresco!”
Entrance to Casanova’s first cell in the Doge’s Palace, which he shared with rats “the size of rabbits.”
The Italians shook their heads in horror.
We filed into Casanova’s second cell, which had slightly better ventilation and light, to hear about Plan B, whose details have been verified by historians from the prison archives. Now more closely watched, Casanova smuggled the iron spike, which he had hidden in the spine of a book, to a fellow prisoner, a disgraced priest and first-class neurotic named Martin Balbi, and put him to work making a hole in the ceiling. At midnight on October 31, 1756, the odd couple made their break. After wriggling from their cells, they climbed onto the palace roof, two hundred feet above St. Mark’s Square. The priest suddenly realized the danger—not to mention the fact that Casanova had no actual plan—and tried to back out. Casanova refused to let him. They nearly slipped to their deaths but managed to get back inside the palace through another window, using ropes made from torn sheets. At the bottom of the Golden Staircase, they discovered to their horror that the main prison gate was locked from the outside. This was when Casanova’s savoir faire came to the rescue. He was carrying in a bag around his neck the flamboyant wedding clothes he had worn the morning he was arrested—a lace-trimmed coat, ruffled shirt, and tricorn hat with long feather—and now he put them back on. Glimpsing this chic figure through the grille, a guard assumed that he was a rich visitor accidentally caught inside after visiting hours. As he opened the door, Casanova and Balbi elbowed past and scampered for the first gondola.
“The escape made Casanova famous, but he would not return to our beloved city for nearly twenty years,” Luciana sighed, as if mourning on behalf of Venetian womanhood. “When he did come back, it was to a hero’s welcome. Even the inquisitors wanted to hear him tell the story of how he got away!”
I was trying to visualize the scene when I had a stroke of luck: the philosopher’s mother announced she was about to faint from the heat. The Italians went into fits of shouting, then proceeded to carry her downstairs, with Luciana leading the way, barking on her cell phone for medical assistance. I found myself standing alone in Casanova’s dismal little cell. After all the high security and mystery surrounding the Secret Tour, the solitude was intoxicating. At last I had a tiny glimpse of Casanova’s presence. I took a few photos—frutto proibito, forbidden fruit!—then went back to the first, even more dismal cell, and photographed that, too. Nobody was going to chase me out. In fact, I probably could have stripped down naked and really channeled Casanova.
But then it occurred to me that I might actually be locked in. The next Secret Tour might not be for weeks. So I slunk sheepishly down the stairs to face Luciana, now decidedly annoyed.
When I emerged into the Piazza San Marco, it took a while for my eyes to adjust to the sunshine. Unlike Casanova in his flight from Venice, I plopped myself down in a café chair, ordered a prosecco, and pulled out his memoir.
As Luciana had said, the escape from the Doge’s Palace made Casanova an exile from his beloved home city. Despite all his brilliant adventures as he zigzagged from Paris to Madrid to London to St. Petersburg, his fondest dream was to return to Venice. When the Inquisition finally did pardon him in 1774, he was nearly fifty years old, broke, his looks fading. (One of the more disconcerting elements of The Story of My Life is Casanova’s unsparing assessment of the ravages of time. It was at age thirty-eight, he reported, that he “began to die”; middle age was merely a step away from “sad and weak, deformed, hideous old age.”) Slipping back to Venice, he moved in with a young seamstress and almost resigned himself to domestic retirement. But he became ever more prickly and cantankerous. In 1782, now aged fifty-seven, Casanova published a libelous pamphlet about a powerful patrician who had offended him, and he was forced to flee Venice once again.
Running up debts as he skulked around the scenes of his former glory, he was finally forced to accept a job in exchange for bed and board—as, of all things, a librarian. A nobleman named Count Waldstein offered him the position at Castle Duchcov in Bohemia, part of the modern Czech Republic. To the elderly Casanova, it was a humiliating final act. He was tormented by the castle staff, who mocked him for his self-important airs and refusal to learn German. When the count was away, the cook would serve Casanova curdled milk, scalding soups, and, worst of all, pasta that wasn’t al dente.
Casanova’s nostalgia for Venice now grew unbearable. The crumbling city mirrored his own lost youth, and the knowledge that he would never return finally pushed him into a black depression. When he turned sixty, a doctor suggested that he write his memoirs in order to stave off suicide. Today, the world should be grateful. According to his letters, Casanova began writing for twelve hours a day, laughing out loud the whole time and piling up 3,500 manuscript pages. He died thirteen years later in the castle, without ever seeing Venice again. “I lived as a philosopher,” were his last improbable words, “and I die as a Christian.” His gravesite on the grounds has since been lost.
The posthumous journey of his memoir is one of history’s miraculous publishing success stories. On his deathbed in 1797, Casanova bequeathed the monstrous manuscript to his nephew-in-law in Dresden, who eventually sold it for a pittance to a local printer. It was written in French because this was more commonly read than Italian, let alone Casanova’s own Venetian dialect. A heavily censored edition was finally published in 1822, a quarter century after the author’s death, and became a runaway hit; for the next 140 years, pirate translations and bowdlerized versions of this censored edition flooded the bookshelves. The original French manuscript, meanwhile, was kept locked up in the Dresden printer’s safe, where it only narrowly escaped destruction by Allied bombing in the Second World War. It was not until 1961, thanks to the efforts of eighteenth-century literature experts, that the first uncensored edition saw the light of day—just in time for the sexual revolution and renewed bestseller status. In 2010, Casanova’s original manuscript was purchased from the family of the nineteenth-century publisher by the French government for a record $9.3 million. Its return to France wa
s hailed as a triumph. The fact that Casanova was quintessentially Venetian, whose French was an idiosyncratic version filled with Italianisms, has clearly been forgiven. (The purchase was arranged by a private French donor; it’s unknown whether the Italians bid.)
I can easily imagine Casanova bristling over his fame solely as a great lover. In his memoirs, he repeatedly insists on his own exalted status as an intellectual and becomes childishly resentful whenever he feels dismissed as a “merely” handsome voluptuary. His carnal adventures—122 affairs—take up only a third of the memoir, while there are endless digressions on philosophy, history, and the arts. But nobody would deny that this third includes the most energetically written sections. “I have devoted my life to the pursuit of pleasure,” he declares on page one without the slightest regret.
Our current view of Casanova as history’s ultimate playboy may be unfair, but it’s hard to feel sorry for the guy.
Chapter Seven
VATICAN VICE
The Pope’s Pornographic Bathroom
Long before the sensational inventions of Dan Brown, the Vatican has had trouble explaining away long chapters of its history. The discomfort becomes most acute with the Renaissance, when popes were princes first, not men of God, and cardinals were their flamboyant, worldly courtiers. Like all Italian aristocrats, the top Roman clerics lived in Babylonian opulence, hosted feasts with beautiful courtesans, sired bevies of children, and were more likely to die of syphilis, poisoning, or cross-fire on the battlefield than natural causes. As the intellectual leaders of their age, they were also avid patrons of the arts; they relished the rediscovery of the Greco-Roman world and a more sensual, pagan direction in painting and sculpture. But in later centuries, as the Papacy became more conservative and puritanical, an awkward silence fell over the hedonistic past.
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