This frightening gorgon stood aside and let the party into a filthy kitchen. Giacomo clung to his mother’s skirt hoping that they would soon leave. He simply could not believe it when Signor Baffo told him that he was a lucky boy because from now on he was always to live in this house. Instead of his mother and grandmother, Signora Mida was to be in charge of him in future. She would wash him, tend him if he felt poorly, feed him, put him to bed at night and see that he got up in the morning. Why, she was even going to find a schoolteacher for him, and make sure that he studied hard.
Giacomo gave a quick surreptitious glance up at the bearded monster with her deep scowl and dirty clothes. What Signor Baffo had just said could not be true; his mother would never leave him here! He waited for her to assure him that this was so, but Zanetta said nothing, even when he tugged at her skirt. Too shocked to speak, Giacomo watched as his trunk was brought in and opened up and an inventory was made of the contents: breeches, shirts, shoes, stockings, a small crucifix, a set of silver cutlery that his grandmother had given him as a going-away gift.
The monster muttered something about money. With her delicate pale hands Zanetta opened her pretty purse and counted out six gold sequins into Signora Mida’s large oily palm. These, she said, were for Giacomo’s keep for the next six months. She could never feed a growing boy on that amount, never mind keep him in clean clothes and pay for his schooling, Signora Mida grumbled. Well, she would just have to manage, Giacomo’s mother told her, for that was all the money she had.
Then, without even asking to inspect the room where he was to sleep from now on, Zanetta bent down and peremptorily kissed the nine-year-old goodbye. Firmly detaching his clenched fingers from her skirt, she warned Giacomo to obey Signora Mida in every way, and then, without so much as a backward glance at him, she walked out of his life.
‘Ce fut ainsi qu’on se débarrassa de moi.’22 So, on this bitter note, ends the first chapter of the first volume of Casanova’s memoirs: That was how they got rid of me. He did not see any member of his family again for six months, or his mother for a year. Her abandonment of him in Padua was to prove a defining moment in his relationships with the opposite sex. Never again would Casanova willingly let a woman he loved walk out on him. In future he would make sure that he was the one to leave first.
What prompted the widowed Zanetta Casanova to banish her eldest child from his home on his ninth birthday? With her new baby, whom she had named Gaetano after the father he would never know, she now had eight mouths to feed, including her mother and herself – a daunting responsibility for any woman. Of her seven dependants, only Giacomo was a real worry to her. As her eldest he should have been of help to her at this terrible time, but instead he was her greatest burden. ‘I was very weak, lacked an appetite, was incapable of concentrating on anything, and appeared to be an imbecile,’ was how he later described himself.3 Instead of living, he merely vegetated. Communication seemed beyond him. Slow to learn to read, Giacomo walked around in a dream world, and although his mouth hung open all the time he rarely spoke. Physically, he was thin, frail and prone to terrible, frequent nosebleeds when blood dripped steadily from his nostrils like water from a faulty pump, leaving him exhausted.
The physicians reckoned that Giacomo lost two pounds’ weight of blood through his nose every week, and argued interminably over the cause of it. One maintained that the milky fluid in Giacomo’s intestines turned to blood; another that the volume of his blood increased with the amount of air he breathed. Since none of their recommended cures worked, about four months before his father’s death his grandmother had secretly spirited Giacomo out of the house during one of his nosebleeds and taken him by gondola to consult an elderly witch on the island of Murano. Sitting on a bed in a small hovel, an old black cat perched on her lap, the witch listened intently as Marcia Farussi told her about Giacomo’s illness, then put out a withered hand and accepted a precious silver ducat from her. Shooing the cat off her lap, the witch opened a large chest, picked the boy up and pushed him into it. As she closed the lid on him, trapping him in the pitch-dark, she told him not to be afraid. So insensible to his surroundings was Giacomo that he did not cry out or protest even when the witch banged on the sides of the chest with a stick; and when she eventually pulled him out he was still meekly holding his red-spattered handkerchief to his nostrils, which had at last stopped dripping. The witch was not yet finished with him. She undressed him, stroked his body, then burned medicinal herbs on the fire, collecting the smoke they produced in a sheet and wrapping him in it. After rubbing a special ointment on his temples and neck, she dressed him again and assured him that he would now get better – but if he told anyone what had happened to him that day he would certainly die. Sweetening this bitter warning with five sugared almonds, she told him to expect a visit from a beautiful woman that evening; his future happiness would depend upon her.
In the middle of that night, Giacomo awoke to see a dazzling beauty appear in the fireplace of his room. Dressed in magnificent clothes and wearing a crown of fiery stones on her head, she sat down beside him on his bed. When Marcia woke him the following morning he tried to tell her what had happened, but she stopped him: hadn’t the witch said that his very life depended on his silence? Giacomo shut up. But something profound had happened to him. From that morning on he became more aware of his surroundings. The beautiful woman, and his visit to the witch, became his first precise memories.
His nosebleeds, however, did not stop. And after his father’s death it was decided that, with all this loss of blood, something drastic had to be done to stop the boy following his father to an untimely grave. Gaetano’s friend Giorgio Baffo consulted Knipps-Macope, a famous physician and professor of medical botany and practical medicine at Padua University, about his condition. The professor diagnosed that the root of the boy’s nosebleeds lay in the unusual density of his blood, a condition which was caused by the quality of the air that he breathed. If Giacomo was to survive he must be removed from Venice immediately, for only a complete change of air could save his life.
Given this advice by the revered professor, Zanetta had no alternative but to send her eldest son away from home. Death had stalked her marriage from the very beginning, and God only knew when it would strike again. Her own parents had been simple working people. Her father Girolamo Farussi was a cobbler from the lagoon island of Burano. His wife Marcia had been a childless widow when she met him; and by the time their only child was born she was thirty-seven years old. Although the couple did not take their marriage vows until little Zuanna Maria, as Zanetta was baptised, was one year old,4 they regarded themselves as respectable people, which was more than could be said of many of their fellow-Venetians.
There was simply nowhere else on earth as extraordinary as the Republic of Venice, nor a people as amoral as its citizens. Built at the point of the globe where the East met the West, and situated in the middle of a lagoon on an archipelago of more than one hundred islands, the exotic city was one of the wonders of the known world, famed for its music and wild social life as much as for its magical beauty. Between the eleventh and the sixteenth centuries its rulers had been sinister, fierce and ruthless, qualities that had enabled them to establish a supremacy over their neighbours, to conquer Corfu, Cyprus, Constantinople and Crete, to control the trade routes to Asia Minor and turn the Republic into the most powerful shipping and trading nation in the Mediterranean. At its height the Arsenale, Venice’s walled port some two miles in circumference, had employed sixteen thousand men and housed the world’s greatest shipping fleet. Fired by single-minded self-interest, Venice’s government, which was made up entirely of its ancient patrician families, had crushed its competitors, spied on its residents and tortured its dissident citizens mercilessly.
By 1707, however, the year of Zanetta Farussi’s birth, Venice was all but bankrupt, its trading empire had crumbled, the Arsenale lay almost empty of ships and the Council of Ten, the Republic’s once-feared ruling body, wa
s reduced to issuing sumptuary laws preventing the importation of French fabrics or the wearing of too many jewels. The most feared power in the Mediterranean was now little more than a tourist attraction – but it was a most glorious one. Venice’s ancient and dilapidated palaces appeared to float on water like the wooden galleons which jostled for space along its famous Grand Canal. Its magnificent basilica, San Marco, threatened to sink into the lagoon under the great weight of the plundered gold it contained, and its centre of government, the massive Doge’s Palace, was constructed on such a scale that it dwarfed the human race.
Despite the difficulty of crossing the Alps to reach Venice, foreigners from Northern Europe arrived there in their tens of thousands every autumn, and stayed for months on end. Their purpose was partly to explore the maze of canals and the architectural jewels of the city, but more than anything else they came to enjoy themselves. For despite the seeping damp, the finger-numbing wind that blew off the Adriatic and the occasional flurry of watery snow, wintertime in Venice was one long, wild, hedonistic masquerade ball to which everyone from the most lowly servant to the most exalted patrician was invited. The tiny city boasted more theatres than Paris, its churches and even its orphanages reverberated with the music of professional orchestras, and its Carnival season, when everyone donned masks and cloaks, extended to six months of every year instead of the meagre two weeks celebrated elsewhere. Venice was a party city par excellence. It partied all night long week in, week out, and held more public fetes, civic processions and religious festivals than any other city in the world.
Most alluring of all its attractions, perhaps, were the Republic’s women, who were not only beautiful but famously flirtatious and as free with their favours as the men who pursued them. Nowhere in Europe was the game of love played with more relish than within Venice’s watery borders. With its winding canals, mysterious dark passages and damp musty smells, the city reeked of sex and promised romance, torrid affairs or quick casual encounters – whatever one wanted, given freely in what the English traveller Lady Mary Wortley Montagu called an atmosphere of ‘universal liberty’. Venice was quite simply the sex-tourism capital of Europe, the place where young male aristocrats on the Grand Tour congregated to scatter their wild oats. Its maze of dead-end alleys, canals, quays and narrow bridges seemed to have been designed specifically with intrigue in mind, as did its anonymous black gondolas with their discreetly curtained cabins just big enough to hold two lovers.
Alla mattina una massetta, al dopo dinar una bassetta, alia sera una donnetta ran a local Venetian proverb – a little Mass in the morning, a little game of cards after dinner, a little woman in the evening. Venetian women were renowned for being beautiful, well-dressed and available. They bleached their hair a streaky blonde by pulling strands of it through the crowns of wide-brimmed straw hats and sitting out on their roof terraces all day in the sun. They adorned themselves with dresses made of sumptuous imported fabrics and wore fabulous pearls and precious stones around their long slender necks. A surprising number of women of all classes were sexually available. The city had been overrun with courtesans for more than a hundred years, and although young unmarried virgins of the patrician classes were safely cloistered away from sexual predators in the Republic’s fifty-odd convents, their mothers and even their maids enjoyed an unprecedented amount of freedom. Allowed out all day either on their own or with their cicisbeo, a male companion or lover who was officially sanctioned by their families, they moved freely about the city on foot or by gondola, at liberty to do whatever they pleased. Anonymous in their carnival masks, androgynous in their floor-length black cloaks, these liberated wives played cards in the back rooms of theatres, frequented low-life taverns and smart cafes, and even visited male friends in their private casini, the small, luxuriously-appointed houses or apartments used by the wealthy for gambling and secret liaisons. No one knew exactly where they went to or what they got up to, and in most cases no one cared. Even God, it appeared, smiled upon love affairs in the Serenissima, where ‘Christ Defending the Woman taken in Adultery’ was one of the favourite subjects tackled by the city’s painters.
Marcia and Girolamo Farussi had to accept that Venice’s tourists, thespians and the ruling class behaved as if they were living in Sodom and Gomorrah. However, ordinary working folk such as themselves lived by higher standards, and they expected their only daughter to do the same. When Zanetta fell in love with an actor from the local theatre, they were outraged. For actors were despised beings in their eyes, and rumoured to have no morals at all. ‘Remember you are persons whom God abhors, tolerated… only for the sake of those who enjoy your sinful antics,’5 a member of Venice’s Council of Ten had once warned the city’s acting profession and, though the Farussis were materially worse off than many actors, they held themselves to be superior to them. If Zanetta married an actor, she would inevitably go on the stage herself, and actresses were no better than glorified whores who freely granted their male admirers whatever they desired. The prospect was unthinkable.
That their daughter’s suitor, twenty-six-year-old Gaetano Casanova, had slipped into a theatrical career by chance and came from a good family made absolutely no difference to them; nor did the fact that, when he had first fallen in love with an actress himself, his own parents had been as outraged as the Farussis now were. Gaetano had only been nineteen years old when, in his native city of Parma, he had met Giovanna Balletti, an actress popularly known as La Fragoletta after the strawberry-shaped birthmark on her breast. La Fragoletta had not only been a despised thespian but a married woman some thirty-five years Gaetano’s senior; both her son and her daughter were older than her lover was. When the senior Casanovas had objected to the patently unsuitable liaison, their son had impulsively run away from home in order to live with the actress, and in retaliation his father had cut him off. With no other means of support, Gaetano had left Parma and joined his lover on the road, first as a dancer and later as an actor in the same theatrical company. Sometime before 1723, the two of them came to Venice where La Fragoletta, who was then approaching sixty but still behaved as if she was a young star, shone playing soubrette roles.
Given the age gap between them, it was almost inevitable that the ill-matched lovers would part one day and, predictably, it had been Gaetano Casanova who had eventually left La Fragoletta (years later, when she was an old lady with ill-fitting false teeth and a wig, she still considered that he had never fully appreciated her). Unwilling or unable to return to the bosom of his family and admit that he had made a mistake, Gaetano had stayed on in Venice where he had joined the highly acclaimed company of Commedia dell’ Arte players at the San Samuele theatre, a building owned by nobleman Michele Grimani. By late 1723, Gaetano had fallen in love with Zanetta, the beautiful cobbler’s daughter who lived close by, and she had fallen for him too.
Ironically there was about as much chance of Girolamo and Marcia Farussi agreeing to the match as there had been of Gaetano’s parents condoning his relationship with La Fragoletta. But like her lover before her, Zanetta refused to bow to her parents’ wishes. Young, headstrong and displaying some of the determination and strength of character that would stand her in good stead in later life, she eloped without their consent. Provided with the necessary certificates and accompanied by two witnesses, she and Gaetano threw themselves at the mercy of Venice’s Patriarch, Pietro Barbarigo, and were married on 27 February 1724 at the parish church of San Samuele.
There was a high price to pay for Zanetta’s behaviour. Her mother went hysterical when she found out what had happened. Her father was so distraught that he literally died of grief within the month. By following her heart Zanetta had unwittingly killed her father and made a widow of her mother. The Casanovas’ marriage was mired in guilt. When their first child was born on 2 April 1725, the couple named him Giacomo after his estranged paternal grandfather, and Girolamo after his late maternal one.
Had Zanetta known that her firstborn Giacomo Girolamo would po
sthumously become one of the most famous men ever to have lived, she might well have taken more interest in him, but she appears to have had little maternal instinct as far as he was concerned. When her husband was invited to join a troupe of actors travelling to England at the beginning of 1726, she accompanied him, leaving her ten-month-old infant in her widowed mother’s care for an indefinite period.
Invited to London by the Dukes of Montague and Richmond, the Comédie du Théâtre de Gherardi, as the Italian troupe were called after seventeenth-century harlequin Evaristo Gherardi, arrived in the sprawling metropolis of London in mid-March, and opened at the New Theatre in the Haymarket on the twenty-fourth with La Fille à la Mode ou le Parisien Dupe, an Italian comedy in spite of its French name. Despite a rather mixed reception, the following autumn they moved across the street to the grander and more famous King’s Theatre, a building owned and designed by playwright and architect John Vanbrugh and managed by the charismatic if notoriously ugly Swiss impresario Johann Heidegger. Heidegger staged opera at the King’s in conjunction with court composer George Frideric Handel. He also threw lavish masquerade parties there for the aristocracy, thus earning himself the reputation among churchmen as England’s ‘principal promoter of vice and immorality’ and ensuring that his premises became the epicentre of fashionable London society. Eager to exploit any new scheme to make his theatre pay, Heidegger booked the Gherardi players to perform at the King’s on nights when no other entertainment was being held there.
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