Giacomo Casanova

Giacomo Casanova was a Venetian adventurer, writer, gambler and sometime diplomat whose memoir, Histoire de ma vie, records a life spent across eighteenth-century Europe. His imprisonment and escape from the Venetian Leads, changing fortunes and extensive social connections made him a witness to courts, salons and urban society.

Giacomo Casanova was born in Venice and died in Duchcov. Casanova travelled across eighteenth-century Europe as a writer, gambler, courtier and adventurer, moving through elite and marginal worlds alike; his posthumously published memoir Histoire de ma vie became an unusually detailed record of European social life.

In Tracy Chevalier’s The Glassmaker, Time moves alla Veneziana, carrying Orsola and those around her through plague, commercial decline, Casanova’s eighteenth-century Venice, Napoleon’s destruction of the republic, two world wars, mass tourism and the COVID era while they age only gradually.