Adventures of Casanova: Episodes from the History of My Life

This selection draws episodes from the vast memoirs Giacomo Casanova wrote in French in the 1790s, looking back on a life spent as adventurer, violinist, gambler, prisoner, and seducer across eighteenth-century Europe. The chosen chapters typically include his youth in Venice, affairs in Paris and elsewhere, the famous escape from the Piombi prison in the Doge's palace, and encounters with nobles, actresses, charlatans, and police. The narrator presents himself as both actor and observer of a society of masks, money, and sexual negotiation. The book is autobiography, not a novel: a sequence of intrigues whose unity is the speaker's appetite and self-justification.

Bound in cloth blocked with a painting. Drak red slipcase.