CASANOVA 1725-2025:
L’eredità di un mito tra storia, arte e cinema

29 August – 2 November 2025
Venice, Museo di Palazzo Mocenigo

Curated by
Gianni De Luigi
Monica Viero
Luigi Zanini

Aldo Ravà, admirer of the 18th century

The Venetian collector Aldo Ravà (Venice, 1 April 1879 – 31 January 1923) was an art and literature scholar, a profound connoisseur of the 18th century and author of over sixty publications on this century.
He had an almost symbiotic relationship with 18th-century Venice, publishing many studies on its leading figures, including Carlo Goldoni, Giovanni Battista Piazzetta, Pietro Longhi, Marco Pitteri, and of course, Giacomo Casanova.
Ravà was among the first to rehabilitate Casanova as an acute interpreter of his time and to recast him as something other than the unscrupulous libertine stereotype.

Aldo Ravà on Casanova’s trail

Ravà’s interest in Casanova began in 1910 after a long stay in Duchcov, a small town in Bohemia where Casanova spent his final years working as a librarian at Waldstein Castle. Ravà dedicated over twenty studies to Casanova. In Venice Ravà began to organise the collected material, publishing an initial account on 18 September 1910 in the article entitled ‘Studi casanoviani a Dux’, published in Il Marzocco. In this article, he describes the castle at Duchcov, and the library in particular:

“This is a vast, vaulted room, wholly whitewashed and illuminated by numerous large, windows. The white shelves and benches are filled with 24,000 volumes, including many incunabula and precious manuscripts. I have observed that the books have been chosen with wide-ranging and discerning eclecticism: there are Greek and Latin classics, works on medicine, natural history, law, philosophy and mathematics, beautiful French editions from the 18th century illustrated by renowned engravers, and numerous theatre collections. Casanova was in charge of this library […]”

Ravà continues by describing the search for further documents preserved in the castle:

“I therefore asked Schloss Verwalter if there was not another room in the immense castle where books or manuscripts were kept; he then took me to a small room on the ground floor […], where I saw cupboards full of papers belonging to the Waldstein family, which I examined without finding anything interesting, and shelves containing three or four hundred volumes, which, after a quick examination, I was convinced must have been Casanova’s personal library.”

Letters from Ladies

As a result of the finding, the Count of Waldstein offered Ravà hospitality in his castle and permission to examine the papers left by Casanova.

The material uncovered in the archives was vast, and amidst this wealth of facts, rumours, passions and papers that had never been explored before, the researcher also came across the hundreds of letters written to Casanova by the many women he had loved.
It was precisely these letters that caught Ravà’s attention, and once he returned to Venice in autumn 1910, he began to work on the volume that Treves published in 1912.

But who was Giacomo Casanova really? The answer is partly to be found in his correspondence with his many mistresses.
In December 1797, he wrote a short autobiography for Cécile de Rogendorf, in which he recounts the key moments of his life, from his early studies to his unsuccessful attempts at becoming a priest, soldier and violinist.
Among the most notable episodes of his life is his arrest and daring escape from the Piombi prison in 1756.
The story of his flight is recounted in the Histoire de ma fuite des prisons de la République de Venise, qu’on appelle les Plombs, published in Prague in 1788.

A contribution to the bibliography of Giacomo Casanova

On one of his visits to Venetian libraries, almost by chance Ravà came across some unknown and extremely rare pamphlets – the Opuscoli Miscellanei and the Messager de Thalie – published by Casanova to promote the performances of a theatre company of French comedians performing at the Sant’ Angelo theatre in Venice.
Encouraged also by his friend Brockhaus, a publisher in Leipzig, Ravà then decided to undertake an ambitious project: to produce, for the first time, a complete biography and comprehensive bibliography of Casanova’s works.

Memoirs and fortune

When Casanova’s Memoirs, also known as Histoire de ma vie, were first published in the 1820s, they immediately caused a sensation.
This was not so much because of their style or form, but because of the content: tales full of private details and secrets that threatened to expose far more than society’s morals would tolerate.
Nevertheless, they fascinated the public, which was increasingly attracted to the private lives of famous personalities, and found exactly what was looking for in the memoirs: weaknesses, scandals, and forbidden confessions. This taste originated with licentious eighteenth-century literature and was revived by these ‘dangerous’ pages.
With the discovery of the manuscript came immediate recognition of its publishing potential, and work began to make it suitable for publication. The German publisher Brockhaus entrusted the translation from French into German to the literary scholar and journalist Wilhelm von Schütz, asking him also to abridge the text by making cuts and corrections.
He also tested the interest of the international market by publishing previews and reviews in several languages: German, French, Polish, English and Italian.
He then made a decision that would further increase curiosity: he locked the original manuscript in a safe, making it inaccessible to the public for over a century. It would not be made available again until 1960. By then, the myth had been born.

Admission to the exhibition with the Museum’s hours and ticket.