Giacomo CasanovaEverything you need to know about the Venetian adventurer (1725–1798).
Canaletto's 1722 view of the Grand Canal from Palazzo Balbi toward the Rialto
Canaletto, The Grand Canal from Palazzo Balbi toward the Rialto, c. 1722 — the Venice of Casanova's youth (painting public domain; photograph CC BY-SA 4.0, Didier Descouens).

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Ten minutes to an accurate picture of Casanova — and an honest map of what this site does and doesn't claim.

The one-paragraph version

Giacomo Casanova (1725–1798) was born in Venice to a family of actors, trained as a cleric and then as a lawyer, and spent roughly four decades moving through the courts, gambling houses, and bedrooms of Europe — Venice, Paris, London, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Madrid — financing his life by gambling, schemes, patronage, and writing. In 1755 he was arrested by the Venetian Inquisitori di Stato and locked in the Piombi, the prison under the lead roof of the Doge’s Palace; in 1756 he escaped over the palace roof and fled to Paris, where he grew rich promoting a state lottery. He spent his last thirteen years (1785–1798) as librarian to Count Waldstein at Dux in Bohemia, writing the enormous memoirs, Histoire de ma vie, that made him immortal. He died there in 1798; the memoirs were not published in their original French until 1960.

Read in this order

  1. Biography — the full life in narrative form.
  2. Timeline — every major event, dated, with certainty labels.
  3. The memoirs — what Histoire de ma vie actually is, and what it covers.
  4. Publication history — why the book you may have read is not the book he wrote.
  5. Quotes — his words, verbatim and cited — the safest way to meet him.
  6. Myths & misconceptions — what to unlearn.

Three caveats to carry with you

The memoirs are the source — and the problem. Casanova is our main witness to his own life. Scholars (notably J. Rives Childs and the editors of the Pléiade editions) have checked his claims against archives where possible; he is broadly reliable on dates, places, and public events, and embellishes private ones. This site flags which is which.

“Chevalier de Seingalt” was invented. From about 1757 he signed himself with a title no authority had granted. It is documented, it is part of his story, and it was not real.

The book stops in 1774. The manuscript’s full title promises the story “until the year 1797” (jusqu’à l’an 1797), but the narrative breaks off in 1774 — the years 1774–1798 are known only from other sources.

Source notes