A rake’s progress

This monumental unabridged audio production of Casanova’s memoir The Story of My Life in three volumes covers his first 49 years. He was born in 1725 into a struggling theatre family in Venice, the carnival centre of Europe, and masks, masquerades and music were so much in Casanova’s blood that a glorious, effervescent theatricality lights up these 125 hours. The narrator, Peter Wickham, is so convincing that he must surely have had difficulty re-assuming his own identity after the final recording session.

Constantly seeking pastures new, Casanova travelled through France, Russia, Spain, Constantinople, Poland and England, transported by sedan chair, sleigh and felucca, but mainly by hideously uncomfortable carriage (74 changes of horses between Moscow and St Petersburg). A charmed life provided him with patrons in each country, enabling him to live extravagantly in aristocratic circles, dining and gambling, frequently on the edge of legality. He narrowly avoided the gallows when he presented false bills of exchange in Holland, and he escaped from Poland after seriously wounding a duke in a duel, in which an injury to his own hand nearly cost him his arm. Venetian spies landed him in a tiny cell beneath the roof of the Doge’s palace and his outrageously perilous escape nearly a year later over the roofs and then by gondola and donkey had him banned from Venice for 18 years. Shady deals of espionage in France and Holland, however, earned him enormous sums.

An essential ingredient of the dazzling excess was food, lovingly detailed throughout. Whether in brothels or high society, dinners included many fine wines (20 bottles of champagne served with the oysters alone), game birds, freshly killed pig, and in Naples a dozen varieties of aphrodisiac shellfish.

Casanova’s fascination with the teachings of the Kabbalah, codes and zodiacal mysticism allowed him to exploit the outlandish beliefs of the credulous rich, and extract serious amounts of money from them.