Giacomo Casanova

Giacomo Casanova (1725–1798) was a Venetian adventurer, the son of two actors, who took a law degree at Padua and then spent his life moving through the courts, gaming rooms and bedrooms of Europe as soldier, violinist, alchemist, lottery promoter, spy and man of letters. Imprisoned by the Venetian Inquisition in 1755, he escaped from the Leads prison a year later in the exploit that made him famous. He ended his days as librarian to Count Waldstein in Bohemia, where he wrote in French the enormous Histoire de ma vie, the fullest record of eighteenth-century society that exists.