Giacomo Casanova once summarized the motto of his life in the following sentence: “I have loved women till mad; but I always preferred my freedom over them.” Even more than through such outspoken confessions Casanova (1725-1798) became a legend through the hacks who exploited his memoirs to satisfy the inhibited lustfulness of the bourgeois public in the prude 19th century. The first complete and correct translation of the twelve volume work was only first published in 1965. With Casanova’s culinary verdict we can today say… “Everything was exquisite, because nothing was falsified.”

Brilliantly talented and given a well-rounded education in Padua, the young lawyer returned to his home town of Venice in 1740, but not to strike up a well-respected career as a lawyer or priest. Rather, his path took him into the dangerous realms of adventure and sensual pleasures that he cultivated with intelligence and growing connoisseurship.

Touchy situations could not be avoided, resulting in a scandal in 1755. Casanova was arrested and imprisoned under the “Leads”, the famous prison attached to the Doge’s palace. When after just over a year he succeeded in escaping from this limbo it caused a sensation, meaning that Giacomo was not entirely unknown upon his arrival in Paris. In the city on the Seine he earned a large fortune quickly by organising a state lottery, but easy come, easy go. His elaborate lifestyle, but primarily a bad investment in a textiles company, allowed his millions to trickle away to nothing. And Casanova then had to vanish once more.

Chevalier de Seingalt, as he now called himself, spent lavishly. He infatuated a beautiful Milanese woman with a lavishly appointed party. Exquisite meat and fish dishes as well as “oysters from Venice that could have been pinched by the confectioner of the chef of the Duke of Modena… We ate three hundred of them and emptied twenty bottles of Champagne.”

That’s how it went all over Europe. Laughing, he tells of his travel experiences, of the adventures and perils of love and cuisine:  The Englishman is a mutton eater and saves expenses for soup and dessert.” In Vienna he found his last patron, a young, rich duke from the House of Waldstein, who recognised a kindred spirit in the aging squire and gourmet.

Casanova was thus able to spend the final, pleasurable years of his life as the librarian of the Castle of Dux in Bohemia, which were hardly overshadowed by illness: “By adjusting my food to my physical constitution I always enjoy the best of health. I have never had a doctor other than myself.”

Text: Thomas Held