The trial of Casanova, Venice Noir 2025

Three hundred years ago a child was born near today’s San Samuele vaporetto stop in Venice. He was christened Giacomo Girolamo Casanova and is, perhaps, the most famous Venetian of all in modern eyes. The great romantic. A libertine. Onetime priest, musician, spy, spiritualist, quack doctor and all-round intellectual charlatan.

Casanova has been lionised in books and films, portrayed as a charming womaniser who may have treated women as the target of his casual flings, but was nevertheless almost heroic in his pursuit of any female he took a shine to. 

But that is because few people have actually read the massive memoirs he wrote in sad old age, working as a librarian in Bohemia after a life that took him on a perilous journey across Europe, dodging creditors, people he’d conned and angry husbands. 

What if Casanova wasn’t a great romantic at all but a perpetrator of a string of sexual abuses, violent on occasion, a paedophile, a crook? That is what we’ll be discussing when we put his shade on trial in the grand surroundings of the Ateneo Veneto as part of Venice Noir 2025. I will lead the prosecution case citing two instances from his own memoirs. One is his shocking account of a sexual encounter in Do Spade, a historic bacaro near the Rialto still around today, and little changed. The other is the tale of his escape from the rooftop cells of the Doge’s Palace, a story quite a few refuse to believe. Lisa Hilton will act for the defence. Anna Mazzola, a lawyer as well as a writer in real life, will give her opinion on the technical side of the evidence. While Gregory Dowling, one of the few people to have read Casanova’s memoirs in their entirety, and in their original French, will be the judge.

And the jury? That’s you. Our audience. At the end of the trial we will ask you to decide… great romantic or an out and out cad?

Four thirty in the Ateneo on November 14. And like all our public book events entry is free. 

More information at www.venicenoir.com.