Pietro Longhi's 18th-century painting of a Venetian carnival scene — Pietro Longhi, *Carnival Scene* — the masked everyday life of Casanova's Venice, painted by a contemporary (public domain).

Relationships

The memoirs name their lovers. Scholars count them. Here's what the record actually says — no more.

The numbers

Scholars who have indexed the memoirs count roughly 120–126 named women with whom Casanova describes affairs — the commonly cited figure is 122. This is a count of named figures in a literary text, not a verified census of his life. The popular figure of “a thousand women” has no basis in the memoirs or in any other source; it is a later exaggeration.

How the memoirs present them

The affairs are rendered as stories, not conquests: each has dialogue, circumstance, and — frequently — an ending in which the woman leaves him, not the reverse. Modern scholars (notably in the Pléiade edition’s apparatus) read the love narratives as the memoirs’ most literary passages: Casanova the narrator is as interested in the intrigue as in its outcome. Several of the women are independently documented — Manon Balletti, the Parisian actress (a genuine Nattier portrait of her survives), and Henriette, the most famous of the memoirs’ heroines, whose identity scholars have never conclusively established.

What this site does not do

This site does not retell the erotic episodes, rank the lovers, or treat the memoirs’ private claims as verified fact. Where a relationship is corroborated by letters or other sources, that is noted on the people page; where only Casanova speaks, the text says so. The memoirs’ account of his own conduct — including his admission that he sometimes used “assurance caps” (early condoms) — is presented as his testimony, not as endorsement.

A note on reading

Casanova wrote in the preface:

“I have been throughout my life the victim of my senses; I have found delight in losing the right path, I have constantly lived in the midst of error, with no consolation but the consciousness of my being mistaken.”

— Memoirs, preface; Arthur Machen’s 1894 translation (Project Gutenberg ebook 2951). Verbatim from the public-domain text.

That sentence — self-knowledge without repentance — is the honest key to the whole book.

Image note. The carnival scene on this page is by Pietro Longhi (1701–1785), the painter of Venice's everyday masked life — a contemporary image of the world the memoirs describe, not an illustration of any particular episode. Public domain.

Source notes

The count of ~122 named women is the commonly cited scholarly figure (J. Rives Childs’s index and subsequent scholarship); the “thousand” figure is identified as myth in the same literature.
The Balletti portrait (Jean-Marc Nattier, 1757) is documented in museum records; Henriette’s unidentified status is the consensus of the scholarship.
The preface quotation is verbatim from Project Gutenberg ebook 2951 (Machen translation, 1894).