Casanova's Women

by Judith Summers

  If he had money in his pocket a man believed he had the right to buy sexual favours from anyone. And, although he had no idea how he would live in the future, compared to the poverty-stricken theatrical family Casanova was wealthy. Using money as his weapon of power, he set out to discover the true sex of the castrato in the hope that, if Bellino was a woman, he could make love to him – or rather, to her. A large tip to the mother elicited the information that Bellino had indeed been certified as a castrato by Ancona’s bishop (intimate inspections of castrati by the authorities were commonplace, in order to prevent female singers from slipping through the net and performing illegally). This conclusive-sounding evidence did not satisfy Casanova, who then generously tipped Bellino’s sisters to stay away from his room. Left alone with the castrato, he offered Bellino a gold doubloon to let him examine his genitals. When he rejected this crude offer, Casanova refused to take no for an answer. Exhibiting the bullying streak he usually kept hidden, he attempted to grope the youth, who firmly pushed his hand away.

  Bellino’s ‘obstinacy’ in refusing him what he wanted threw Casanova into the kind of childish sulk he had already exhibited on part of the journey between Naples and Rome with Donna Lucrezia, for he had already spent fifteen or sixteen golden sequins to satisfy his curiosity, and had so far failed to get anything in return. Determined to get his money’s worth somehow, he began to fondle little Cecilia and Marina when they returned. ‘With all three of us seated in front of the fire eating chestnuts, I began to distribute kisses,’ he wrote. ‘And Bellino, in turn, shows no lack of compliance. I touch and I kiss the budding breasts of Cecilia and Marina, and Bellino, smiling, does not stop my hand from slipping inside his ruffled shirt and grasping hold of a breast which leaves nothing to doubt.’11

  ‘Girl, or boy, what does it matter!’ laughed Sancho Pico when Casanova told him of his dilemma. As long as the castrato was pretty, who cared what sex he was? Casanova clearly did care. Desperate to know Bellino’s real sex, he bribed Cecilia to reveal it, but she claimed that she had never seen her oldest brother naked. The sexually frustrated Casanova then let Cecilia satisfy him in another way – by spending the night in his bed. She was twelve years old, physically undeveloped and, she claimed, a virgin. ‘I did not quibble with her,’ Casanova wrote in his memoirs. ‘Love is the divine sauce that makes that particular little morsel delicious. Cecilia was charming, but I had not had time to desire her; so I wasn’t able to say to her, you have made me happy; it was she who said it to me; but I wasn’t much flattered by it.’12 The child’s compliance earned her the generous sum of three doubloons. Not wanting to be outdone, her sister Marina – only eleven years old but, Casanova noted, more physically developed and sexually experienced than Cecilia – earned a similar sum to have full intercourse with him the following night.

  In the eighteenth century, Casanova’s behaviour, which today would be regarded as criminal, was not that unusual. The concept of childhood as we know it scarcely existed at the time. In France there were no laws to prevent the rape or sexual abuse of children. In England, the age of female consent, which in 1275 had been fixed at twelve years old under canon law, had in the late sixteenth century been lowered to just ten. Child prostitution was a common fact of life among the desperately poor, for destitute parents regarded their daughters as a potential source of income, one of the few commodities they had to sell. And wealthy men were willing to pay a high price for the privilege of deflowering a young virgin, partly due to the widely-believed myth that it would cure them of venereal disease.

  However, even by the standards of the time there was something distinctly unsavoury about the fickle ease with which Casanova switched from pursuing the fifteen-year-old castrato to seducing both his pubescent sisters, and it earned him Bellino’s contempt. Contempt turned to disgust a few days later when the castrato accompanied Casanova to Ancona’s port. Here they boarded a Turkish vessel, and were left alone in the captain’s cabin for a few minutes with a beautiful Greek slave girl. Without exchanging a single word with the slave, Casanova immediately unbuttoned his breeches, pulled her on to his lap and had sex with her. And, to Bellino’s amazement, the slave complied ‘like a bitch which only listens to its instinct’.13

  As Casanova had perhaps intended, Bellino was deeply shocked by this behaviour, which ran completely contrary to his own romantic nature. Or rather, to her romantic nature. For, as Casanova suspected, Bellino was in reality a young woman disguised as a castrato. Her name, he tells us, was Teresa Lanti, and she was born in Bologna around 1730.

  Although Casanova rarely, if ever, disguised the names of his thespian lovers, there has always been speculation about Teresa Lanti’s identity. She has been named as any number of eighteenth-century sopranos, the most popular being Angiola Calori, a Milanese singer who achieved fame in London in the late 1750s and early 1760s. There was, however, a real Teresa Landi, born in Bologna on 15 May 1731 to parents Luigi Landi and Flavia Gambarini.14 Furthermore, a sumptuous portrait of a singer bearing her name hangs today in the theatre museum of the famous La Scala Opera House in Milan, although no one has ever been sure of the painting’s real provenance.

  Whatever her true identity, Teresa told Casanova that she grew up as the only daughter of a poor widower who worked for the city’s Institute of Science, where several men bearing the name Landi are known to have been employed at the time. When she was twelve, her father took in a lodger, a talented castrato in his late twenties who was to end Teresa’s lonely childhood and transform her life. In his memoirs Casanova identified him as the celebrated singer Felice Salimbeni, but it is far more likely from the date and place of his death that he was Salimbeni’s direct contemporary, the Milanese castrato Giuseppe Appiani.

  On the verge of great success in Bologna in 1742, Appiani, as Teresa later told Casanova, took on as his protege a local youngster named Bellino, and sent him to study with a singing teacher in the nearby city of Rimini. At the same time he fell in love with his landlord’s eleven-year-old daughter. Entranced by Teresa’s beauty and wonderful singing voice, he taught her everything about music that his own singing teacher, Nicola Porpora, had taught him.

  His reward, Teresa said, ‘was such as his affection forced him to ask of me; I did not feel humiliated to grant it to him, since I adored him’.15 In short, she became his lover. Castrated men were widely presumed to be impotent and have no sexual desires, but this was not necessarily the case. Many castrati were far from sexless. The great Salimbeni smiled knowingly when people pitied him for having been castrated; the famous Farinelli fell passionately in love with his nephew’s young wife; and in 1766 primo uomo Ferdinando Tenducci caused a scandal by eloping with Miss Dora Maunsell of Limerick, a well-connected young Irishwoman whom he later married in Cork. Tenducci was a star in both England and Ireland: his voice, immortalised by Lydia Melford in Tobias Smollett’s novel Humphry Clinker, published in 1771, was said to be ‘neither man’s nor woman’s; but it is more melodious than either; and it warbled so divinely, that, while I listened, I really thought myself in paradise’. His fame did not stop Dora’s outraged family from kidnapping her and having him thrown into prison. Despite this, Mr and Mrs Tenducci stayed together, had two children and later published a full account of their relationship and subsequent persecution.

  Teresa worshipped her father’s lodger. Although she later reassured Casanova that ‘men like yourself are, without doubt, to be preferred over those who resemble my first lover’ (one can presume that this was a great relief to the great seducer) Appiani was the exception. ‘His beauty, his mind, his manners, his talent and the rare qualities of his heart and soul’ made her prefer him to all the whole men she had met up until that time. In addition, he was modest and discreet, rich and generous. Castration had turned him into a ‘monster of adorable qualities’.16 But within a year of arriving in Bologna, he was offered engagements to sing in Ferrara and Venice, and Teresa was heartbroken at the thought of parting from him. When, just b
efore his departure, her father suddenly died of a malignant fever, she was inconsolable. Unable to leave her all alone in Bologna, her lover took her with him as far as Rimini, where he planned to board her with the same music teacher who was currently training his young protégé Bellino.

  Tragically, Bellino had just died. Appiani immediately hatched a daring plan that would allow Teresa to continue her musical education and ensure that they would eventually be able to live together without incurring society’s disapproval. From now on, she must pretend to be Bellino. In this guise he would take her back to Bologna and board her with the real Bellino’s mother, whom he would pay to look after her while she continued her musical training. In future, Teresa would have to sleep and dress alone to prevent her true sex from being discovered, and when her breasts developed people would think nothing of it ‘for having too much bosom is the usual defect of our sort’. In four years’ time her lover would send for her to join him, and from then on they would live together as two castrati and no one would be able to criticise them for it. In short, in exchange for publicly renouncing her sex, Teresa would have a lucrative singing career and the man she depended on

  From that moment on, Teresa effectively became Bellino. It was a complicated, risky and often humiliating deception for a girl who was little more than a child. Dressed in the dead boy’s clothing, she returned with her lover to Bologna, where the real Bellino’s younger siblings – Petronio, Cecilia and Marina – were tricked into thinking that she was their real brother whom they had not seen for some years; only Bellino’s bereaved mother knew the truth. Since it was common practice for castrati to have to undergo intimate examinations by priests or theatre owners anxious to avoid prosecution by the Church for unwittingly employing a female singer, Appiani supplied Teresa with a small prosthesis that would give her the appearance of having a penis. It was ‘a kind of cat-gut, long, limp and as thick as one’s thumb, pale, and of very soft leather’ surrounded by an oval of transparent skin five or six inches long. Teresa quickly learned to attach it to her own genitals with gum tragacanth, a glue made from a shrub.

  Once he had settled Teresa with her new family, the castrato left Bologna and Teresa had a premonition that she would never see him again. She was right: thirty-year-old Appiani died soon afterwards in the nearby city of Cesena, of erysipelas, a disfiguring skin disease known as St Anthony’s Fire. For the second time in a few months, Teresa was bereaved. Since she had no other means of support she continued to live with Bellino’s mother who thought it best to continue the deception in the hope that her new ‘son’ might one day make the family’s fortune on the stage. In the meantime the woman found a singing engagement for ‘Bellino’ in the city of Ancona, where her surviving son, Petronio, was employed as a female dancer.

  A precarious, almost farcical existence on the road began. While Petronio put on a ballet dress and danced in the female chorus of the theatres they worked for, Teresa donned breeches during the daytime and, at night, put on a dress and sang castrato roles. Her reputation soon grew. By the time she was fourteen her alter ego Bellino had engagements in Ancona and Rimini and even in the Holy City itself, and since ‘he’ looked so feminine, each time ‘he’ performed in a new city Teresa had to glue on her false penis and endure a degrading examination by the priests before she could work. She was risking disgrace, prosecution and a severe punishment by breaking the law against women performers, and her life was made even more unpleasant by the men who constantly molested her in the hope of procuring ‘illicit and dreadful favours’ in return for the money she and her family so badly needed. Homosexual men who believed that she was a boy and wished to use her as such made Teresa so angry that she feared she would stab one of them. Heterosexual men who were convinced that she was a woman pestered her with terrifying requests to inspect her mutilated genitals.

  Casanova appeared to fall into the latter category. Though the fifteen-year-old was revolted by his coarseness towards her and her adopted sisters, her feelings were complicated by the fact that she was secretly attracted to him. However, his crude behaviour with the Greek slave girl on board the Turkish vessel was the final straw for her. Unaware that Giacomo and the slave had encountered each other months before in Ancona’s lazaretto where, locked up on separate floors of the building, they had attempted to have sex through a large hole in a balcony floor, Teresa decided to teach him a lesson. At a supper party laid on that night by Sancho Pico, she appeared as she did on stage: as a castrato disguised as a woman. Casanova was set on fire by her feminine beauty. He could not rest until he had discovered Bellino’s secret. In his opinion the singer had obviously set out to arouse and confuse him, and he now demanded that he satisfy his curiosity. When Bellino refused to expose his genitals, Casanova held him down and forced up his skirt. One quick glance was enough to enlighten and shock him: for, perhaps anticipating that this would happen, Teresa had glued on her false penis. ‘Astonished, angry, mortified, disgusted, I let him go,’ Casanova wrote. ‘I’d seen that Bellino was a real man; but a man to be despised as much for his degradation as for the shameful calm which I had observed in him at a moment when I should have seen proof of his emotions.’17

  The following morning, still furious at having mistaken the singer’s sex, Casanova left Ancona for Venice. Since he had already promised to take the castrato as far as Rimini, where his next theatrical engagement was, he did not renege on this, so Bellino/Teresa accompanied him on the journey north while the rest of the family followed on. Teresa had perhaps supposed herself safe from Casanova’s prurient interest now that he had glimpsed her genitals, but she was wrong. He still ‘could not look into (her) eyes without burning with desire’18 and as soon as the carriage left Ancona he began a long, vicious tirade against her in the hope that it would shame Bellino into letting him touch with his hands the evidence he had seen:

  I told him that since his eyes were those of a woman and not a man, I needed to convince myself by touch that what I had seen when he had run away was not a monstrous clitoris ... I no longer care to see it; I only ask to touch it, and you can be sure that, as soon as I am certain, I’ll become as gentle as a dove, for as soon as I’ve acknowledged that you’re a man it will be impossible for me to carry on loving you … If it turns out that you truly are a castrato, permit me to believe that, knowing you perfectly resemble a woman, you have hatched a cruel plan to make me fall in love with you in order to drive me mad by refusing me that proof which can alone restore my sanity … You must also be aware that your obstinate refusal to give me the clarification that I ask you for forces me to despise you as a castrato. The importance you attach to the thing is puerile and malicious ... If you have a human soul you cannot persist in this refusal… . With my mind in such a state you must finally realise that I must resolve to use force, for if you are my enemy I must treat you brutally as such … What has infuriated me is the display you have made of your charms, the effect of which, you must understand, you cannot ignore. You did not dread my amorous fury then, and do you expect me to believe that you fear it now, when all I ask of you is to let me touch an object which can only disgust me?19

  This was Casanova at his most manipulative. Years of being indulged by his grandmother had led him to believe that he could get what he wanted at the instant he wanted it, and his bullying threats and guilt-provoking arguments in the carriage reduced the young impostor to tears. Still she would not give in to him. He was not her master, Bellino/Teresa reminded him, in fact she – or rather he – was travelling with Casanova on the strength of a promise he had made that he would leave him alone. If he persisted in persecuting him, Bellino would get out of the carriage and walk all the way to Rimini. Bellino assured Casanova that, had ‘he’ been a woman, he would have loved him in return, but since he was a man he would not give in to his demands, ‘for your passion, which is now only natural, would all of a sudden become monstrous’. Casanova might perpetrate a brutal act of anal rape, or even murder ‘if I stopped you from
penetrating an inviolable temple, whose gate wise Nature only made to open outwards’.20

  By late afternoon Casanova had been shamed into submission. But his relentless onslaught had finally worn down the girl. When they reached the city of Senigallia, where they were to spend the night at an inn, Bellino/Teresa suddenly capitulated and offered to share his bed that night. The outcome was predictably passionate. Overjoyed to get his way – and hugely relieved to find out, once they were in bed, that the beautiful castrato he so desired was indeed a woman – the angry bully of the last few days instantly metamorphosed into a tender, thoughtful lover and confidant; Casanova at his best. He listened to Teresa’s life story attentively, then asked her to show him how she glued on her catgut penis. As the contraption ‘offered no obstruction to the well of her sex’21 it made Teresa even more sexually alluring to him, but their attempts to make love whilst she was wearing it were hopelessly comical.

  During the course of that night Casanova fell deeply in love with Teresa. Donna Lucrezia, the great love he had parted from a matter of weeks ago in Rome, was now forgotten in favour of the fifteen-year-old singer. The following morning he impulsively asked Teresa to marry him. A civil ceremony could only increase their feelings and respect for one another, he reasoned to himself. It would also be necessary for them to marry if they were to be accepted by good society, and although he had been thrown off his original course of a clerical career in Martirano and Rome, he was still hungry for professional success and the approbation of his social superiors.

  No sooner had he popped the question, however, than Casanova began to have misgivings. Did he really want to marry at such a young age, or indeed to marry Teresa? Her talent would ensure that they ‘would never lack the necessaries of life’22 but the idea that he had no job and might have to live off her terrified him. He decided to give her a starkly honest analysis of his position in life to test her out. Contrary to appearances he was not a rich man, he confessed. All he owned was ‘youth, health, courage, a modicum of intelligence, a sense of honour and integrity, and a few attempts at a literary career. My great treasure is that I am my own master, that I am not dependent on anyone, and that I am not frightened of misfortunes. My nature tends towards being a wastrel. That’s your man.’23