Dan Snow's History Hit - The Real Casanova

Episode Date: February 7, 2023

Content Warning This episode contains adult themes and language that may not be suitable for children.On this special network crossover episode we're calling 'History Hit in the Sheets', host of our chart-storming 'Betwixt the Sheets' podcast Kate Lister joins Dan to unravel the stories, adventures and troubled legacy of Casanova.Sex - lots of sex. That's what we think of when we think of Giacomo Casanova, Italy's most prolific lover and adventurer. But, there was much more to this Venetian womaniser than just romancing - he was a scam artist, outlaw, alchemist, spy and church cleric. He wrote satires, fought duels, and escaped from prison more than once. He even set up the French national lottery. We know so much about Casanova thanks to his mammoth three thousand page autobiography. It spoke of his incredible life in Europe, but is regarded as one of the most authentic sources of information about the customs and norms of European social life during the 18th century. He's often been painted as a rascal but today many question the darker side of his sex life; within his 'tally' of sexual partners, many seem forced and some were children, including his own.Produced by Freddy Chick, Charlotte Long and Mariana Des Forges. Mixed by Dougal Patmore.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!Download the History Hit app from the Google Play store.Download the History Hit app from the Apple Store.

Hey everyone, welcome to the pod. We've got a special episode for you today, very special. But it's the amazing Kate Lister, who's been on this podcast many times, so brilliantly that she's now got her own pod, Betwixt the Sheets. How are you doing, girl? Hello! I'm so pleased to be here. It's great fun to have you. It's great fun to be... You know what's nice, Kate? Being a colleague. We're colleagues now. Colleagues! We send each other emails, a bit of light banter on the whatsapp hang around the water cooler gossiping about sheila from accounts yeah we did do well

we hung around in a pub so yes i guess that's correct i'm jumping on your successful bandwagon and we'll do something a little bit different today we are a mash-up episode and we're going to talk about casanova who's one of those rare people whose life becomes such a legend, they actually become a noun. Is it a noun or a metaphor? What a Casanova. That's a noun. So he had a life so full of sex and adventure. I mean, I'm blushing here because obviously I get called Casanova all the time, all the time. He was charismatic, smart, witty, clever, and he rubbed shoulders with anyone who was anyone in 18th century Europe. He had obviously fought duels. He escaped from prisons and he wrote extensively. But how true are the myths around him? Kate, let's talk about it. He's one of those people where you read things

and you think, well, that can't possibly be true, but it kind of is. He invented the lottery. He traveled widely. He did have sex with a lot of people. He did use linen condoms. And he did use oysters to try and seduce people. And he lost his virginity to a pair of sisters. Okay, so we can expect sex in this episode, folks. Some of it comics, some of it not comics. So buckle up. And this is a content warning for everyone.

Yes. This is History Hit in the Sheets with me, Dan Snow. And me, Kate Lister. Enjoy. T-minus 10. Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity.

Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off. And the shuttle has cleared the tower. Kate Lister, how's it going? You've got the fastest growing podcast in the world. The Twixt, it's pretty cool. I always love your sexual advisory stuff at the start. You're like, of course it is.

The whole point is to take your Muppets. That's my favourite bit, is having to go, right, yeah, it's about sex. We're going to talk about sex. It's like when you get the little bottles of Night Owl and it says, warning, may cause drowsiness. Yeah. But I actually quite enjoy that bit now.

It sounds like you enjoy that bit, for sure, for sure. I mean, Casanova is like a central figure of this story, isn't he? I mean, it's bonkers. There's a lot of things you could say about him, and I'm sure that we will, but you'd have to say that he drank deeply from the cup of life, I think is what you'd have to say about Casanova, as he lived several lifetimes over, didn't he?

I think that he realises quite early on, you sort of get the sense when you read his memoirs, which is really the only source that we have for Casanova, is these thousands and thousands, 10,000 words or more memoirs that he wrote when he was in his 60s. And you get a real sense of him sat there. He was a librarian at the time because he'd fritted everything away. By the way, can we just briefly, Casanova ended his days as a librarian. I love librarians, but I mean, that is a classic. It is, isn't it? Because he earned his fortune several times over and then spaffed it up the wall repeatedly because he

couldn't stop gambling he was a terrible terrible gambler and sort of everything he did was about chance and opportunistic and he would keep getting in trouble he'd keep being chucked out of places which is kind of one of the reasons he was on the run all the time is because he would keep pissing people off and then he'd be exiled but i don't think he ever stopped being a chancer. I think he worked out very early on that he was really clever. And he was. He was really, really bright. But I think that he worked out that you can trick people.

You can manipulate people. And I think he liked doing it as well. So he is super smart and he graduates. He's really clever. He hates the law, doesn't he? He hates it. But he graduates super young from university and is it still a teenager he's really young he's one of those like child

prodigies he graduates from law at about like 17 or something like that and he was just a voracious reader of books he would just absorb everything but then he's stuck because well all right you're very clever and you know a lot of stuff and you're quite good looking by all accounts but what are you going to do you're still the son of an actress and you're penniless. So he attempted to go into the church for a bit, but wasn't very good at it. He was a bit of a wrong-un, wasn't he? Well, do you know, he was really good at delivering the sermons

and people started coming from all over the place to hear him talk. But there was one incident where he got smashed before he was supposed to give the sermon. And then he wasn't sure what he was supposed to do, so he pretended to faint rather than give it away that he was absolutely sozzled. And it just became pretty obvious that he was not going to fit in the church because he kept shagging everyone. And he then, he basically finds himself a wealthy patron, right? Which is, I mean- He does.

It's just a shortcut. It's a life hack though, isn't it? But then what are you going to do? You're like 18 years old. How are you going to make your money? It's a very, very, very different world. You can't really have an apprenticeship. If you haven't inherited the money, there's only a few options available to you, really. And getting a wealthy patron is definitely one of them.

And he does score the jackpot, and it's Senator Braggadin. Casanova found him when he was having a heart attack or a stroke and he kind of launched into, and it's another example of him being this brilliant con artist. He launched into this, oh my God, I'm going to help you. I'm the hero. And he picked him up off the street and took him back to his apartments and lay down the bed. And then he made this whole big song and dance about how he'd saved him and his doctors couldn't. So when Braga Dinn kind of came back round, he was incredibly indebted to Casanova and he made him his principal heir.

But it's another example of him bullshitting really, really well. Well, instead of being a healer slash alchemist, it's something that he would turn to when he was struggling for a square meal. Yeah, and it was a dangerous game, actually. And it was one that would come around and bite him on the ass because in Venice at the time, there was sort of their own version of the Inquisition going on, which is sort of the repressive religious authorities were getting very upset with this sort of magic, occult, sacrilegious stuff going on.

And Casanova really liked that. In fact, he's got one story that when he was really little, his grandmother took him to a witch to heal him of nosebleeds, which is extreme. mother took him to a witch to heal him of nosebleeds which is extreme and he thinks at some point that he is able to perform magic and kabbalah and mysticism and at some points like when his life pretends to be like a spiritualist and a mediumist but he does kind of play around with this stuff how much he believed it himself i'm not quite sure yeah he does a bit of philosopher's stone action doesn't he we should talk about sex because he is also the victim of child abuse. I mean, he had his first sexual experiences were under the age that he was young. I mean, wasn't he?

He was young. He didn't have full penetrative sex until he was in his teens. But his first sexual experience was with a woman that was older than him, definitely. And he kind of remembers it as like it awoke something in him that he was going to devote the rest of his life to. But today, yeah, we'd say that that's child abuse. And then he's so famous sleeping with nuns, but that does fit within the genre of sort of literary nun porn

in the 18th century. It was actually a thing. It was a thing. You've got to be careful when you talk about Casanova because it's like how much of it is true? if the authority that you've got on this is himself is his memoirs how much of it can be corroborated by other source material you know or how much of it if you put different lenses on it and like it's your mate at school that was bragging about shagging two supermodels and when you're like did that happen

did that happen and there's certainly a lot in the memoirs that sort of maps onto quite popular genres of porn at the time and nun porn was quite big but yeah famously he had two very turbulent love affairs with two women who lived in a nunnery yeah we should talk about his um he was in prison you've mentioned this and his famous escape from prison because that is a classic. Tell me about that. Right. Okay.

So he gets imprisoned because, and this is going back to what you were saying at the beginning about at the time people were aware that he was shagging people he shouldn't be shagging and he was getting a reputation. And he was, like the Venetian authorities were gathering information on him about him being a fornicator and a seducer of women and a liar and somebody that stole men's wives away and was generally a rake and a

scoundrel. But what really did for him was this sort of dabbling in magic that he liked to sort of put about. And there was the accusation that he'd said anyone who believes in Christianity is weak. And he was arrested on those charges and he was thrown in jail in Venice. And he stayed there for 15 months and he did manage to escape, which was no mean feat because he was right up in, they were called like the lead cells or something like that because they had lead on the roof. So it's how does he get away? And he manages to find it sort of like an ice pick, but it's not. But imagine like an ice pick. And he manages to sort, it's sort of like, I'd say an ice pick, but it's not, but imagine like an ice pick. And he manages to sort of make a hole in the ground, but then he's moved to a different cell just as he's about to Andy Dufresne it, right? But then he starts talking

to a monk who's a bad monk, who's in the cell next to him. And he manages to get him the ice pick. And then he kind of tunnels through to his cell and they pull each other out. And then they're like loose in the rafters in the ceiling of the building of the jail this is a perfect example of Casanova being a complete con artist so they're climbing up the roofs climbing in the eaves and the only place they can get to is like this big great hall that they kind of drop down into but all the doors are locked so it's like well that's brilliant we can't get out but they're so tired they fall asleep and then they get woken up the next morning by a guard opening the door and Casanova leaps into action straight away and he goes how dare you how dare you treat us like this and what he knew was there'd been a ball there the night before

so he managed to pass off in that second that they were two guests of the ball that had been locked in there overnight by accident the guard was so apologetic and terrified that they'd report him to his superiors. He led them out of the building. That's like mad skills, that, isn't it? Mad skills for joyful years before official papers. Yeah. It just shows how far confidence can get you, doesn't it? If you just front it out. After he escapes, is that when he goes to France? There's this incredible, the most proper bit. Well, I say that, it's still gambling, but the most kind of perhaps the bit of his career

that he's not actually breaking multiple laws and customs at the same time. He goes to France, he goes to Paris. Yeah, and he loves Paris and he learns the language. And again, he's seducing everybody, famous courtesans, famous actresses, famous men's wives. But the one thing that he does is he, quote unquote, invents the first lottery. Yeah, like a national lottery.

Like a state lottery. Yeah. I mean, again, what he does is he manages to convince people that he's invented it. But what he actually did is he nicked the idea from other people that he'd been speaking to. So it wasn't his idea, but he packaged it really well and he was an amazing salesman. So he sold this idea to the Parisian authorities. And obviously the lottery is win-win for everyone. It's all those poor schlubs think, yeah, but I might win it. And we kind of enjoy that little buzz and the people that win are

the company that does it. So he made them a lot of money and he made a lot of money for himself. But yeah, he's still remembered as the inventor of the lottery. He gets a bit of work as a spy at this point. He hangs out with Madame de Pompadour, who's Louis XV's sort of favourite foremost mistress. And Rousseau he's hanging out with. I mean, it's bonkers. If he did hang out with him. Oh, you see, maybe he's just making it up. He might be. I mean, there's some corroborating evidence

because when his memoirs were discovered and finally published, there was a lot of his letters and correspondence that was found. And there are letters that have been written to him. So we know that, I mean, unless he was going to the extent of faking letters written to him, like we know that some of this can be corroborated, but you can't help but reading it through and go, oh, you helped Mozart with your music, did you, Casanova?

Right, of course you did. It just sounds very much like, yeah, he goes to another school, you wouldn't help but reading it through and go, oh, you helped Mozart with your music, did you, Casanova? Right, of course you did. It just sounds very much like, yeah, he goes to another school, you wouldn't know him. It's just got that kind of vibe about it, but maybe I'm being really horribly wrong. Maybe it was all true. Well, I don't know if you want it to be true or not. It's so bizarre.

I like the way he basically nicks loads of money off an old French aristocrat by promising he can make him young again, and then goes to Britain to flog his lottery scheme to the British government and ends up shagging some Brits. Then he does do this kind of mad European tour. Again, meets Frederick the Great, meets Catherine the Great. Wild. Yep.

He's all over the place. And you can look at that as like, isn't that quite exciting that he's always kind of on the move. lives this very kind of rootless existence but he also keeps getting thrown out of places so he has to keep leaving places when he was in england he was chugging various courts and he didn't like it very much because he couldn't speak english all that well and they couldn't speak french which is kind of nice because he had this thing about like he didn't just want to have sex he also wanted witticisms and banter and, you know, all those things, knock knock jokes. I don't know. So he didn't like that very much. And he got in trouble with

quite a famous courtesan in Britain whose name escapes me. She had a French name and she wouldn't sleep with him. And he got really upset and angry because it's like the first woman that had refused him. I think he slapped her as well. and he was really upset with himself and he left this is history hit in the sheets with me dad snow and me kate lister don't go anywhere there's more to come i'm matt lewis and'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history.

We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were.

By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. It's funny, the pictures of Casanova, I'm being a bit superficial, it doesn't look super attractive. And I just wonder if, like, people's teeth must have been so bad. If you were like a bog standard six and a half out of ten, seven, were you like a ten in the 18th century, do you reckon? I think that what Casanova has, and I still think that this is true today, self-confidence and self-belief and wit and being funny is one of

the most attractive things that you can have like you could put someone in front of you that is a solid 10 out of 10 like your absolute dream shag and it would be amazing for a bit it'd be like oh my god i can't believe i get to play with this this is incredible how long would it take before you started going still here like if they had like no personality if they were actually quite boring to be around like how long would it take for that novelty to wear off but he didn't have that he had wit and charisma in absolute spades and so he was really confident and that will get you like so far almost every time listen to this kids that's advice for you from the expert that That's advice. Yes. He was expelled from Warsaw when he had a duel.

I mean, come on, he's got to have a few duels. And he got shot in the left hand with a kernel. They've argued over an actress, of course. Of course. By the way, can we just talk about the actress thing? What is it about an actress, hence the bishop actress phrases that we use? Tell me about 18th century actresses. Right, so there has been, as long as there... Because women weren't always allowed on the stage,

of course, like right in Shakespearean times, it was men playing the roles of women. So it was considered very daring when women were finally allowed on the stage. And there has been a very close association between actresses and sex workers, courtesans. They've merged into one another for a really, really long time. And I suspect it's because an actress has got a certain amount of agency that other women don't have. So for example, Casanova's mother, she traveled all over Europe. You're not going home to a husband, that you have a certain amount of freedom that's built into that, that you're on the stage. So

you're already being admired. That's definitely a part of it. And if you look at some of the great courtesans throughout history, they start off as actresses like Nell Gwynn one of my favorites she started off as an actress on the stage and that was how she caught the eye of Charlie boy Charles the second and became his mistress so there's a really close association between the two is this unusual event once he talks honestly about how he had sex with men as well as women is that something given that sodomy is capital crime that that strikes me as kind of quite honest? He doesn't quite go into the same gory details that he does with women. There's like veiled suggestions. So he would write about one of his famous lovers, M.M., who was actually a nun,

of course she was, but he was also the lover of a really prominent bishop, of course she was, and that they had sex while the husband watched and it's kind of like is that true or like was he in there as well but there is one incident where he's very very attracted to a famous singer a castrato and he goes to have sex with him and then kind of realizes at the crucial moment him is a her and she's been masquerading as a castrato and stuffing her pants with a fake penis and there is a certain amount of he seems to be getting off on it a little bit so he probably wouldn't have written it down in explicit detail because as you said it's like

really really bad but he seemed to have sex with literally everything. He gets back to Venice eventually. I just love the way he just travels, looking for opportunities to ingratiate himself with rich people. And then occasionally he just doesn't find it. He's like, oh, Spain was complete. Nothing happened there. So then he keeps going. He's like a shark.

He's got to have oxygen over the gills. I find it such an extraordinary way to live. It would be interesting, like, what would people make of him today from a psychological point of view like there's so much going on there that he never marries and settles down he doesn't really have a permanent home like he said he's always on the move it's this very sort of rootless existence but he seems to really thrive on it as well and like in some places he's when he was in paris he was a millionaire and then he lost it all which is like an incredible feat like how the hell did you do that you silly sod and then other places he was just working as a violinist as a fiddler because he couldn't do

anything else he certainly fiddled anyway he certainly fiddled but also i was like you know now we've got credit cards and sadly people can run up massive. But like when you're wandering around Spain looking for a rich person to read their fortune or do some crazy stuff to, other days when he's got nothing left in his wallet, he's like, like I am going to go hungry and sleep in a barn tonight. Like I find that just that pre-modern journeying lifestyle, I find it kind of so fascinating, the logistics of it. How does it work?

A lot of it's on credit and a lot of it is like the art of the con artist is to make people think that they can trust you so he needs to present himself to people and he kind of gets this reputation

people might know who he is even if they know him as a rake and a scoundrel he was definitely famous for his jailbreak so he's got a kind of a license to sort of turn up at places

as a fascinating person He just gets to a village goes where's the big house kind of bang on to sort of turn up at places as a fascinating person. He just gets to a village, goes, where's the big house? Kind of. Bang on the door. Hey, everyone, it's your lucky day. Casanova is in town. I'm here.

It's really weird. It's the thought of like B-list celebrities turning up at your house going, hi, I'm here. It's mad, isn't it? But he sort of had this reputation. So he knew where to go and he knew the right people. There's a certain sense that he kind of just things happen to him at least in the memoirs that's how he remembers it like he doesn't seem to be able to just go out to the shops for a pint of milk without bumping into

an actress or a courtesan or or benjamin franklin or benjamin franklin here he meets yeah extraordinary they talk about aeronautics and balloon transport together. They do. And he's spying. He seems to have a little nice, towards the end of his life, he gets that nice little stipend from the Venetians. He does a bit of spying. I guess he's flogging his Rolodex, he's flogging his little back book and his contacts

to provide a bit of intelligence to the state security services. I think he would be a brilliant spy, apart from the fact that he wrote it all down in a memoir, which was definitely a bit of a giveaway. One of the things that he was really good at was reading people. And so the way that he seduced, and I think that he still continues to seduce people actually, because we're still drawn to him. We're still like, who was this person, this enigmatic person, is that he kind of presents himself as this very exciting person who does stuff that you couldn't possibly do. And I think that's quite magnetic, isn't it?

The reality of it would be very different. And his last years, as we said at the beginning, he was a librarian, amazingly. He got very depressed. He was having a not particularly good time. That's the period in which he claims Mozart helped him with a few bits and bobs. As you do.

But then wrote this unbelievable memoir that's surely your dream because i've talked to you many times in this podcast you're saying the big problem is people don't write down the things we do like sexually and we don't write honest memoirs right we all write boring unbelievably because we don't offend people we don't want to get caught out for telling little porcupines but he is one of those rare people that does just write this incredible memoir and it is an incredible as a historical document it's so valuable and it wasn't published unedited to begin with it took a while to get the full gory details out there but again even that as valuable as that is you've got to always be thinking is this uncensored though or because there's a real sense that he knows he's writing it for an

audience he knows and that he's really enjoying reminiscing one of my favorite quotes from his memoirs is I wrote my life to laugh at myself and so far I've succeeded so he's like having a really good time remembering this stuff but it's how accurate was it if we could find the people he's writing about and go well casanova seems to think that you had an amazing time is that what you remember it's i'm not so sure if those things would marry up but it's still such a valuable document i like his line where he just says i can say i have lived and i think is probably true um although it's not whitewashed things there was at least one but several rape allegations

and then he slept with his daughter. What's going on with that? It's really complex because if I tell you this story about this guy who invented the lottery and he's funny and he's charismatic and he chagged his daughter. It's like, whoa, go back one. What?

So we're kind of left with this like, wow, okay. If it's true, if it's's true we don't know if there's corroborating evidence but he he had an affair with a woman called lucrezia and then years later he met her daughter who was called leonilda and he almost had sex with her and then it found out that that's actually his daughter he almost had sex with her and then there's a weird description about he has sex with lucrezia while leonilda is in the room but he doesn't have sex with them but that's weird like we're in weird territory already and then he has this thing about later on when he met her when she's like 25 she was unhappily married because she couldn't get pregnant so as

a favor as a fatherly favor he has sex with her to get her pregnant and it's kind of just like Casanova like I want to be on your side but it's like what are you doing and it's again you've got to like I'd say look at it in the context of the time but no one was chugging their daughters at the time even at the time but what it might be is playing to incest porn, which was bizarrely common. Like the Marquis de Sade writes about it all the time. And when you look at erotica into the 19th century, there's a weird amount of incest. And by the way, incest porn is still incredibly popular today on Pornhub. It's not fathers and daughters.

It tends to be stepmother and stepson, that kind of thing. So what he might be doing is bullshitting and trying to create weird sexual fantasies. Not that that makes this okay, but that's what he might be doing. I guess I struggle with his life to think, how unusual was it? Other lives like this, but that we just don't know about. Is it the fact this one's chronicled? It's fascinating, isn't it? And if they hadn't found those manuscripts, if they hadn't been published,

we might never know that this man... Yeah, they had a really interesting life, didn't they? They survived the bombing of Leipzig. They were suppressed for years. It's only quite recently that they've all come out, really. Yeah, and we're still discovering little things like who his famous lovers were. Because he anonymises some of them in the memoirs,

like MM and CC and all these things. like who his famous lovers were. And because he anonymizes some of them in the memoirs is like MM and CC and all these things. I think that he was unusual even for the time. And I think that he knew that he was unusual and he had to have been unusual because no one would have given a shit about him otherwise. You can't be turning up at the court of Catherine the Great and going, hello, I'm casting over the completely normal because no one cares. He had this huge appetite for adventure. And I think that he just said yes a lot. You know, like most of us have that kind of like, I'm not really sure I should be doing it. I don't think he had that. He just

steered into the skid his entire life. Steered into the skid. Yes, he did. Well, Casanova felt like the obvious point where our two podcasts would intersect. Because I love the 18th century and you love the history of well things that go on betwixt the sheets although i don't think casanova was betwixt the sheets for that long i think it was it was you know it was anywhere he could try it up against walls in castles boats anywhere but he must have done it betwixt the sheets a few times i mean you think so wouldn't you yeah some of the relations were a bit longer i think they would have had time to for a bit of sleep occasionally um but you know he only actually

slept with about 120 people i think that's quite an important thing i think that's quite interesting as well it made me think that it's not a kind of eye-watering figure i don't think it's not is it no yeah i might be giving away too much about myself but when i read that i was like what yeah i think it's really interesting i sometimes wonder whether he includes is that like a class thing does he not include like a quick like roll in the hay with like somebody he considers are those people like named people that he considers important so i think that was interesting also though i wonder how like catherine the great had love affairs and gained a reputation as like a serial shagger well in fact she seems to have been someone who enjoyed a consecutive series

of reciprocal loving relationships. And I wonder if in those days, maybe that was an astonishing number of people to have slept with. It's fascinating. I mean, it's still quite a big number, but when you think of someone like, I think Gene Simmons brags that he slept

with over 10,000 people. Yeah. It was a mad weekend, I'm telling you.'m telling you that's kind of that sort of number and i think that's quite an important point i mean yeah there's a lot of dodgy stuff about casanova but you'd have to say that he does fall in love a lot that there is like a lot of casual sex but he does seem to have genuine relationships a lot of people but i have also wondered were these just the named people what about like the faceless poor people that you had sex with?

But yeah. Yeah, that's the thing I find interesting about him. But yeah, it's fascinating. Well, listen, Kate, thanks very much for coming on my podcast. I'm surprised you have time these days. You're so important to come on my podcast. I really appreciate that.

Well, you know, just I'll try and remember you from when I was done. It's been so lovely to talk to you thank you