Down at the picture palace, there seems to be a run of randy men in tights.
Towards the end of last year, we had Johnny Depp in The Libertine. And now,
Casanova arrives in an eponymous film that opens this week, with Heath
Ledger and Sienna Miller. You may already have seen the trailers. “You are
accused,” a stentorian voice intones, “of debauchery, trespass and heresy
with a novice.”
“She was hardly a novice,” our hero drawls.
Casanova was a Venetian from his buckled shoes to his perfumed wig.
As a repository of erotic desire, Venice has few rivals. In all that
undulating water, among all those shifting reflections, there is some subtle
sexual anchor. Boats knock against stone piers and passengers rock against
one another. Venice is both intimate and unknowable. It is a place of
coquettish concealment and sudden, heart-stopping revelation. With its
labyrinthine lanes and web of narrow canals, it has managed to make
mysterious allure a geographical feature. The mask is its most iconic
symbol. There is something quirky and dark about Venice, and sex, if you are
doing it right, should have something of the quirky and the dark.
It is the perfect spawning pool for the world’s most prolific lover. Gambler,
cardsharp, alchemist, musician, spy, philosopher, entrepreneur, Casanova was
a man of many parts, yet his reputation rests firmly on one. He was reputed
to have bedded 122 women, and not all of them individually. Famous too for
his literary endeavour, he wrote an autobiography that ran to 12 volumes —
clearly a man of stamina.
He was born close to San Samuele, in Calle Malipiero, a lane so narrow that a
woman in a bustle skirt would cause a traffic jam. His parents were both
actors, though some suggest his real father was the owner of the nearby
Teatro di San Samuele, which would make Casanova, appropriately, the result
of the casting couch.
At one historical period or another, Casanova’s neighbours were Goethe,
Ruskin, Galileo, Chateaubriand, Barbara Hutton and Frank Lloyd Wright, as
well as two popes and four kings. Everyone comes to Venice, and you can play
this game of associations with any corner of the city. Wagner wrote the
second act of Tristan just around the corner, and Napoleon watched a regatta
from a terrace on the Grand Canal a chamber pot’s throw away. Nearby is the
Palazzo Mocenigo, from where one of Byron’s lovers threw herself in despair
into the Grand Canal. Across the water is the Ca’ Rezzonico, where Pope
Clement XIII lived and where Browning died.
Ca’ Rezzonico is now the museum of the 18th century — Casanova’s century. I
took a traghetto across the Grand Canal. A vaporetto passed in a wash of
water. A beautiful girl gazed wistfully through one of the windows, pursing
her stained lips. A taxi crossed our stern, bearing a mysterious woman in a
white headscarf towards the Rialto.
Born in 1725, Casanova was a creature of the 18th century, of its decadence,
its intellectual ferment and its changing social mores. Had he been born in
an earlier century, he wouldn’t have got away with half of his exploits.
A century later, he wouldn’t have encountered such interesting underwear.
Once one of the great houses of Europe, Ca’ Rezzonico is worth a visit just
for the views of the Grand Canal from the top floor. But its best views are
meant to be enjoyed while lying on your back. The most striking feature of
the palace is its magnificent ceiling paintings, the most famous of which is
by Tiepolo. In Ca’ Rezzonico, it is not so much lie back and think of
England as lie back and think of bare-breasted maidens cavorting with a lot
of trouserless cupids.
Weary of nudity, I repaired to the opera. La Fenice, the magnificent opera
house, is another 18th-century creation. Though we are unsure if Casanova
ever enjoyed its acoustics, it was certainly his kind of place. In the 18th
century, theatre-goers were more concerned with watching the audience than
the performance. Accordingly, the long rows of elegant boxes face one
another rather than the stage in order that the occupants might entertain
themselves with flirtatious glances, fluttering fans and the endless passing
of notes. Sadly, The Sunday Times was confined to a corner box so high and
so obscure that flirtation was impossible. I could see nothing but the rear
end of the lighting rig.
Round at the Doge’s Palace, I had more luck, with an inside view of Casanova’s
former prison cell. I had booked onto a special tour known as the Secret
Itinerary. This takes you beyond the magnificent gilded state halls into the
back rooms of the palace, the world of the Doge’s infamous secret service.
It was a world that Casanova knew all too well. It was here that he was
incarcerated, and from here that he made his infamous escape across the
Venetian rooftops.
The tour had a surreptitious quality. We met the guide in an obscure corner of
the palace courtyard. Casanova would have liked her; she was a tall redhead,
with a penetrating gaze and the kind of voluminous figure that was hot in
the 18th century. She warned us sternly that no bags, no photographs and no
recordings were allowed. On the landing of the great gilded staircase, she
took a tiny key from her pocket, opened a side door concealed among the
architectural mouldings, and counted us into the Doge’s nether world.
A labyrinth of narrow corridors and small, anonymous rooms brought us to the
Secret Chancellery, where the archives of the state were stored in ranked
cupboards. Paper was the lifeblood of this closed, impenetrable world —
letters, payments, treaties, reports, denunciations, confessions, appeals,
sentences — great shoals of paper that wafted from office to office in an
endless tide. Now, in a modern facility near the Frari, they are said to
occupy almost 50 miles of shelves.
Beyond the chamber of the State Inquisitors, where information was extracted
with the help of a little light torture, we found the prison cells known as
the Piombi, the Leads, so named as they were tucked beneath the lead roof of
the palace. They were freezing in winter and broiling in summer. It was here
that Casanova was confined in 1755.
His principal crime was sleeping with other men’s wives, never a thing to
endear yourself to the community. But adultery was not illegal, or half of
Venice would have been locked up, so jealous husbands were obliged to
denounce him for crimes against religion. He got five years.
The Piombi was one of those obliging prisons that the mafia would later make
famous. You bribe the gaoler and you are soon living the life of Riley.
Casanova arranged for books, candles, good food, a decent bed and a
favourite armchair to be ferried up to his cell. Hidden in the armchair was
an iron spike, and he now worked every night, cutting a hole through the
floor. But with only one night to go, he was moved to a new cell. It was his
salvation: he was within a few inches of cutting through the middle of a
Tiepolo ceiling into the office of the Three State Inquisitors.
Nothing daunted, Casanova smuggled his spike to a renegade monk in an
adjoining cell and, some weeks later, the two men were clambering across the
rooftops. Lowering themselves on knotted sheets, in the manner of all
swashbuckling heroes, they reached the Piazza San Marco. Casanova was
reported to have paused for a coffee in the square before hailing a gondola
to take him to the mainland and freedom.
When our hero returned 20 years later, to work as a spy for the very people
who had imprisoned him, Venice’s great days were almost over. In 1797,
Napoleon arrived. The Doge took off his hat, signalling the city’s
surrender, and Venice, as an independent entity, was no more. A year later,
Casanova died. The good times were over. Venice settled into sedate
retirement, entertaining an endless flow of visitors, regaling them with
stories of the vibrant, lusty city it had once been.
Stanley Stewart travelled as a guest of British Airways Holidays
Travel brief
Getting there: you can fly British Airways (0870 850 9850, www.ba.com)
from Gatwick; EasyJet (www.easyjet.com) from Bristol, Gatwick and East
Midlands; and Aer Lingus (0818 365000, www.aerlingus.com) from Dublin.
Where to stay: a few minutes from San Marco, Westin Europa &
Regina (00 39-041 520 0477, www.europa.hotelinvenice.com; doubles from £222)
is less expensive than the big names, but still a luxury option. Its
terrace, overlooking the Grand Canal, is one of the most spectacular in
Venice. Hotel Flora (041 520 5844, www.hotelflora.it; doubles from £96)
is quiet, secluded and only minutes from San Marco.
Tour operators: British Airways Holidays (0870 243 3406, www.ba.com/holidays)
has three nights in the Westin Europa & Regina from £434pp,
including BA flights from Gatwick. Or try Kirker Holidays (0870 112 3333,
www.kirkerholidays.co.uk).
More info: La Fenice Theatre (00 39- 041 2424, www.teatrolafenice.it);
tickets from £15. The Doge’s Palace is open 9am-5pm. The Secret
Itinerary tour must be booked two days in advance on 041 520 9070. Tickets
cost £10. Ca’ Rezzonico is open 10am-5pm every day, except
Tuesdays; £4.50.
