mission: impastable

Or, the sexy, scandalous, and strangely starchy adventures of Giacomo Casanova.

Happy New Year, friends!

I hope 2024 is off to a rip-roaring start for you all. First, a huge thank-you to all of you paid subscribers, who helped me cover the surprise vet visit with which I kicked off the new year. Mina and I are very grateful for you!! (That’s not true. I’m very grateful for you. Mina is very annoyed you all banded together to send her to her least favorite place on earth, which she sees as the ultimate betrayal.)

she says “fuck off” but I say thank you thank you thank you

I’ve decided to celebrate the start of a new calendar year by profiling a real delight of a dirtbag, and one whom I’ve considered writing about several times except there’s too much information about him and I’m fundamentally a lazy person. But not today! New year, new us! This year, we sally forth bravely to talk about:

Giacomo Casanova, the Prison-Breaking Sex Fiend of Renaissance Italy!

naked baby with wings made of dollar bills does not make an appearance in this story, sadly, but it is a vibe

If you’re familiar with Casanova mostly from the 2005 Heath Ledger film of the same name, good. There was a period of about five years where Heath Ledger’s entire career was lighthearted period dramas where he played sexy charming outlaws and it was, I argue, Hollywood’s finest hour. I think about it all the time.

Giacomo Casanova was born in 1725 in Venice to what seems to have been the greatest family of all time. His mother was an actress, his father was a dancer, and his grandma was a weirdo who took him to a witch who lived in a house overflowing with black cats to try to heal him from his frequent nosebleeds when he was like five years old. I love them. Fuck off, Dr. Spock, this is how all children should be raised.

“so I hear your small Venetian child has a minor ailment”

Unfortunately, Casanova’s parents were too busy being amazing to have much energy left to take care of him, so they sent him to Padua to be raised by a priest. The priest taught Casanova how to read, write, and play the violin, while the priest’s younger sister Bettina taught him…other, sexier things.

I have a profound ick about this. To be fair, Casanova writes about Bettina as this wonderful sexual awakening and has nothing but fond feelings for her for the rest of his life. I don’t actually know how big the age gap was. Let’s warily take his word that it was consensual and move along.

Strange Things Are Afoot at the University of Padua

Casanova was apparently a pretty smart kid, because he enrolled in the University of Padua at age 12? Which? I feel like even in 1737 was probably not the standard age for a college freshman?? And he graduated at 17 with what appears to be a quadruple major in law, math, medicine, and moral philosophy???

Truly, at this point in the story I had to take a step back and ask myself what the cinnamon toast fuck was going on at the University of Padua.

this baby-child is a quadruple doctor

So Giacomo Casanova, JD, MD, MA, MPh, barely old enough to see an R-rated movie in theaters without his weirdo witch enthusiast grandma, has now been turned loose on the streets of Padua. And what does he choose to do with his newfound freedom? Four things, which any one among us probably did our first year out of college:

1. Gamble away all his money

2. Seek out a wealthy patron in his 70s to cover those rapidly escalating gambling debts

3. Prescribe fake medical cures to his friends and the people of Padua because he thinks it’s hilarious, even though his technical job is Lawyer

4. Begin collecting lovers like it’s 1998 and they’re Seamore the Seal Beanie Babies

this is my Seamore the Seal. because I’m a millennial with an MFA, he’s also my retirement plan.

However, Casanova made the cardinal mistake of blending item 2 and item 4: that is, seducing his patron’s mistress, which sort of put a damper on the man’s willingness to bankroll Casanova’s fuckfest.

(Don’t) Take Me to Church

So! For a brief period at least! Casanova needed to get a job! Would anyone like to guess what that job was?

If you guessed “ecclesiastical lawyer,” I would like to understand how your mind works, but also you are right!

This is an example of one of my favorite historical trends: absolutely batshit wild dirtbags getting elbowed into the church as if that will fix anything. Kit Marlowe got a Master of Divinity, my guys. Catalina de Erauso was enrolled in nun school. Casanova was supposed to be a lawyer in a seminary.

It went about as well as you would expect. He kept gambling, writing smutty love letters to various local gentlewomen and/or cardinals, and basically causing scandal after scandal until he got thrown out of the seminary and had to find a new job. Fortunately, Casanova was—as you recall—a lawyer-mathematician-philosopher-violinist-doctor-occultist, and several of those talents were about to come in handy.

“hmm yes according to my expert opinion that ass do be thicc”

One evening in 1746, when Casanova and his friends were carousing around Venice doing various scandalous things with gondolas, they stumbled across the extremely rich Count Bragadin, who just so happened to be dying of a stroke. Eighteenth century medicine being what it was, the doctors on hand were busy killing the guy, but Casanova swanned up and, with the confidence of a dude who got his MD at 12, saved the count’s life.

Count Bragadin and his servants were immediately convinced that Casanova had saved his life with witchcraft, which to be fair is a rumor Casanova probably started himself. In his debt and maybe a little scared of his black magic, Bragadin became Casanova’s lifelong patron. In other words: money! Lots and lots of money!

In other other words: lots and lots of bad decisions!

Get the Hell Outta Doge

Casanova spent another four years or so bopping around Venice, having love affairs and, so Wikipedia enigmatically reports, “digging up a freshly buried corpse to play a practical joke on an enemy.”

the nature of the practical joke is not specified, but this is all I can picture

But then Casanova’s girlfriend broke up with him, so he did what all dirtbags did in the 18th century: he set off on a whirlwind Grand Tour of Europe that he very much did not have the money to pay for.

A brief list of things Casanova got into during his Grand Tour:

• Freemasonry

• Playwriting

• Aggressive blasphemy

• Witchcraft

• Extremely public sexual exploits

• Nun seduction

It’s hard to tell whether the secret cults, the public sex, or the English major behavior was more upsetting to the European authorities, but whatever the case, the Venetian state eventually had enough. In 1755, 30-year-old Casanova was arrested for crimes against common decency and imprisoned in the Doge’s palace.

the fact that this appears unbidden in my brain every time I read about the Doge of Venice is why I can’t study the history of Renaissance Italy

unlimited soup, salad, and sharpened iron bars with which to commit crimes

Casanova had no intention of remaining in prison, so he got his hands on an iron bar and started digging a hole in the floor of his cell with it, so he could drop through and stroll away to freedom. And he was about half an inch away from breaking free…before his patron, Count Bragadin, paid the jailers to move him to a nicer cell, thinking he was doing his guy a solid. You can almost hear Casanova yelling “bruh” from three hundred years in the past.

So the escape attempt started all over again. This time, Casanova enlisted the help of the priest locked up one cell over. And this escape attempt is complicated, so stay with me. Casanova hid the same iron bar in a Bible, which he snuck over to the priest’s cell under a giant plate of pasta.

I’ve been thinking about this for hours now. I can’t figure out why there had to be a plate of pasta involved, except to make the whole thing comically Italian. Why couldn’t he have just sent the Bible? What was the pasta for? I don’t know.

integral to the plot? no. delicious? undoubtedly.

Anyway. The priest used the iron bar to tunnel through his own ceiling, where he crawled through a ventilation shaft or something and then tunneled down through the ceiling of Casanova’s cell.

Problem: by this point, Casanova had a new cellmate, who was a spy for the notorious Council of 10—basically the Venetian CIA.

Solution: Casanova told the spy he’d received a vision that he was going to be rescued by an angel. So when the priest next door dropped through the ceiling like the narcoleptic Argentinean from Moulin Rouge, the spy thought “Ah yes, just as foretold by the prophecy” and had no further questions.

at this point it’s become a game to see how many newsletters in a row I can use this gif for

Spy neutralized by angel-logic, the priest and Casanova shimmied up through the ceiling hole, tunneled through the roof, made an old-fashioned bedsheet rope ladder, and rappelled down into a waiting gondola.

In so many ways, this is the dumbest prison escape of all time. It’s also the only one I’m aware of that includes a completely unnecessary pasta course. I love everything about it.

Yer A Wizard, Giacomo

Some of us might lie low after escaping from prison with a priest whomst we have claimed is an angel of the lord. But not our guy Giacomo! Upon gaining his freedom in 1757, he set off for Paris, where he became passionately involved in three hobbies:

1. Selling lottery tickets

2. Pretending to be a three-hundred-year-old wizard with the power to turn base metal into gold and to fashion diamonds out of thin air

3. Spying for the French government

Honestly, what I want to know is why foreign ministers keep looking at the absolutely batshittest people in history and saying “yes, this is the individual whom I would like to spy for my nation.” The fact that it keeps happening is baffling.

Casanova stayed in France for about three years living his Magical Wizard Spy lifestyle, before accumulating so many debts that he briefly considered joining a monastery just to get the debt collectors off his tail. Of course, he realized this was a dumb move, not being suited for the priesthood. So in 1760, he did another whirlwind tour of Italy instead, this time traveling under the fake name of the Chevalier de Seingalt.

I love this painting because if you look extra hard that window is NOT OPEN. how is Casanova even getting in. maybe he really was a wizard.

Throughout the 1760s and 70s, Casanova traveled everywhere: France, Italy, Poland, Russia, England, Spain, you name it. Basically everywhere he went, he gave and received venereal diseases, adopted a new fake name, and brought up the idea of lottery tickets to local royalty. I do not understand this man’s fascination with the lottery. No one explain it to me. I don’t care to learn.

At some point during this period, Pope Clement XIII gave Casanova the Papal Order of the Golden Spur, a fact at which I literally yelled out loud upon learning. Mister Pope, sir?? Unless the Order of the Golden Spur is given to the horniest weirdos for being fake wizards with gambling addictions who use pasta to commit crimes, I suspect this is not a deserved accolade!

Casanova returned home to Venice in 1774 after the whole “escaped from prison with a priest after outsmarting the CIA” thing had died down a bit. He hung out for a while writing satirical poems and doing some light espionage, until he resumed his usual habit of pissing people off again and had to run away to Bohemia. He spent the last years of his life working as a librarian for an eccentric Bohemian count and writing his 3,500-page memoir.

Barbra Streisand tried, but no one out-goats the goat

Napoleon conquered Venice in 1797, and Giacomo Casanova died a few months later in 1798 at age 73. I’m not saying I have a lot in common with Casanova, but I do respect that he looked at Napoleon and said “actually I would rather die.”

All righty, that’s all for this week, friends and companions. Thanks for joining me for a real journey. Until next time, be well, and if you plan to commit a crime between now and two weeks hence please be sure to incorporate pasta in some way as part of a balanced meal,

-Allison