He is considered to be the greatest womanizer of all time and thought to have bedded thousands of women.
Giacomo Casanova was born 300 years ago in Venice, then the illicit pleasure capital of Europe, to two poor actors.
The philanderer boasted about a selection of his sexcapades including threesomes with nuns and even his own daughter in his memoirs, reiterating how much he loved women and pleasuring them.
Casanova had been set to become a priest when his grandmother, who mostly raised him and his five siblings, sent him to a private priest school aged 9.
While a prospective priest, Casanova received several unholy love letters in his collection plate and his success with the ladies continued when he lost his virginity in a threesome with sisters Marta and Nanette when he was 16.
But he experienced his first orgasm much earlier when his older sister Bettina, then 13, ‘accidentally’ gave him one while washing him by hand.
He also used several remedies to improve his sex life, drinking a mixture of six raw eggs and slurping oysters with his conquests to profit of their aphrodisiac qualities for a love-making marathon lasting as long as seven hours.
For contraception, Casanova often used a sheep’s intestine as a condom – although he highlighted in his memoirs that he preferred to go bare, and as a result he fathered several illegitimate children.
He is considered to be the greatest womanizer of all time and thought to have bedded thousands of women. Giacomo Casanova was born 300 years ago in Venice, then the illicit pleasure capital of Europe, to two poor actors
Pictured above is a scene from the 1987 Casanova film starring Richard Chamberlain as the titular character
The philanderer boasted about his sexcapades including threesomes with nuns and even his own daughter in his memoirs, reiterating how much he loved women and pleasuring them
Casanova went on to become the talk of the town in Venice after having a threesome with a nun and a 17-year-old girl in her convent – who admitted to having been intimate in the nunnery – while the nun’s other lover watched.
Their passionate affair took place in the villa of the French ambassador, who was the nun’s second lover and an enthralled spectator to Casanova’s love fest via a hole in the wall.
Casanova slept with the nun on several occasions, writing that he ‘varied our pleasures in a thousand different ways’ and gave the nun ‘greater enjoyment than she had any idea of’.
He added: ‘Before she left my arms, she raised her eyes towards heaven as if to thank her Divine Master.’
Casanova had a special interest in younger partners and even paid a mother-of-four for time to ‘learn everything’ with her 17-year-old daughter Teresa dressed as a boy as well as 11-year-old Marina and 12-year-old Cecilia, who were also prostituted to him by their mother.
‘All his life Casanova was attracted to young girls. And Cecilia and Marina were very young indeed,’ Leo Damrosch wrote in his book Adventurer: The Life And Times Of Giacomo Casanova.
As the author points out, the age of consent in many European countries was then only ten but it’s impossible to see this as anything but ‘disturbingly exploitative’.
But his sexcapades also had unwanted consequences as he contracted several STDs like gonorrhoea and syphilis.
Casanova (played here by Heath Ledger in the 2005 film) was very popular with women and said in his memoirs that his greatest goal was giving them pleasure
His sexcapades also had unwanted consequences as he contracted several STDs like gonorrhoea and syphilis
Casanova took his STDs in stride, saying: ‘It’s easy to console oneself when one considers that one acquired them with pleasure.’
He also took other risks for his romances, like when he charmed the wife of the mayor of Cologne and slept with her in a bedroom near where the mayor rested for the night.
In terms of his career, Casanova abandoned becoming a priest and tried himself as a violinist, a gambler, alchemist, lottery inventor, silk manufacturer, soldier, spy for France, and con man instead.
Casanova stood 6ft 3in tall at a time when the average man was 5ft 6in and was considered to be an attractive man, with swarthy skin and a mane of dark curls.
The philanderer was an intelligent man, gaining degrees in both civil and ecclesiastical law by the time he was 17. He was also fluent in French, but it was his erotic studies that seemed to most concern him.
A good conversation was important to intelligent Casanova before getting down to business, causing him to turn down a British woman because he didn’t speak English well enough to talk to her.
Casanova had powerful friends and surrounded himself with the who’s who at the time, meeting the Pope, King Louis XV of France, Tsarnina Catherine the Great as well as King Frederick II of Prussia.
His main income came from a succession of rich patrons he conned into funding his philandering, one of whom was a member of one of Venice’s most distinguished families – Senator Matteo Bragadin.
Casanova is pictured above in a painting showing him looking under the large skirt of a woman, who is said to not have been wearing any undergarments
During his employment at the castle, Casanova wrote his 3,700-page memoir ‘The Story of My Life’ in French, outlining more than a hundred of his affairs and publishing it under his gallicized name Jacques Casanova (pictured above is Tony Curtis as Casanova in the 1976 film about the philanderer)
Casanova earned his favour by convincing Bragadin, who was a devotee of the occult, that he had magic powers.
The senator started treating him like an adopted son, giving him an apartment in his Venice palace, an allowance and his own gondola.
Being well-connected to the upper class of Venice helped Casanova avoid prosecution when he was 20 and participated in the abduction and gang rape of a married woman alongside other young men.
But his crimes eventually caught up with him and he was later was imprisoned several times.
His jail stints included the Bastille in Paris and the infamous lead chambers in Venice’s Doge Palace, which were so small he couldn’t even stand upright during his 15 months there.
He eventually escaped by cutting through the roof of his cell with a sharpened bolt and ran away with a renegade monk, spending much of the rest of his life fleeing from one European capital to another, as various frauds – among them cashing forged bills of exchange – threatened to catch up with him.
While on the run, Casanova came to Florence in 1760 and ended up having a threesome with a 17-year-old girl named Leonilda – who turned out to be his daughter – and her mother Lucrezia, one of his former lovers.
He wrote about making love to both women simultaneously and Leonilda subsequently giving birth to a boy who was both Casanova’s son and his grandson.
He also used several remedies to improve his sex life, drinking a mixture of six raw eggs and slurping oysters with his conquests to profit of their aphrodisiac qualities
Casanova’s life was retold in several films, like in Casanova & Co from 1976 starring Tony Curtis (centre)
Casanova spent the last few years of his life in a Bohemian castle, where he worked as a librarian until he died on June 4, 1798.
During his employment at the castle, Casanova wrote his 3,700-page memoir ‘The Story of My Life’ in French, publishing it under his gallicized name Jacques Casanova.
The National Library of Paris acquired the original for about £6million in 2010.
