Giacomo Casanova / Women

WOMEN

by Giacomo Casanova

I have loved women even to madness, but I have always loved liberty better.

Giacomo Casanova / When a man is in love

WHEN A MAN IS IN LOVE

by Giacomo Casanova

When a man is in love very little is enough to throw him into despair and as little to enhance his joy to the utmost.

Giacomo Casanova / Life

Giacomo Casanova

LIFE

by Giacomo Casanova

Whether happy or unhappy, life is the only treasure man possesses.

Open Lines / Giacomo Casanova / History of My Life

Giacomo Casanova

OPEN LINES

HISTORY OF MY LIFE

by Giacomo Casanova

I begin by declaring to my reader that, by everything good or bad that I have done throughout my life, I am sure that I have earned merit or incurred guilt, and that hence I must consider myself a free agent. ... Despite an excellent moral foundation, the inevitable fruit of the divine principles which were rooted in my heart, I was all my life the victim of my senses; I have delighted in going astray and I have constantly lived in error, with no other consolation than that of knowing I have erred. ... My follies are the follies of youth. You will see that I laugh at them, and if you are kind you will laugh at them with me

Giacomo Casanova 
History of My Life. New York 
Everyman's Library, New York, 2006, pages 15 -16.

Casanova, Histoire de ma vie, Gérard Lahouati and Marie-Françoise Luna, ed., Gallimard, Paris (2013) 

Fellini´s Casanova

Donald Sutherland and Chesty Morgan in Fellini's 1976 film Casanova. 

Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/Universal Allstar/Cinetext/UNIVERSAL/Public Domain

FELLINI´S CASANOVA

Philip French
Sunday 16 May 2010 00.08 BST

H

aving helped shape neorealism as a screenwriter in the 1940s, Federico Fellini took Italian movies into a new form of bitter, romantic realism in the 1950s before transforming world cinema with the extravagant, semi-autobiographical La dolce vita (1960) and 8½ (1963).

He was well into the decadent stage of this third phase of his career when he cast Donald Sutherland as a charismatic, increasingly cadaverous Casanova making a circular journey through the great cities of 18th-century Europe, starting during a Venetian festival and ending on a frozen Grand Canal.

Vainly seeking wealthy patrons for his scholarly pursuits, Casanova is seen as both an intellectual figure of the Enlightenment and a licentious voluptuary of a corrupt society about to be swept away by the French Revolution. He's inexorably drawn by his inclinations and reputation into a succession of chilly, unfulfilling sexual encounters, culminating in making love to a mechanical doll.

The semi-coherent, death-obsessed narrative reeks of self-disgust and has the clammy atmosphere of an undertaker's embalming room. Made entirely on fabulous Cinecittà sets, it's superbly photographed and magnificently staged and Sutherland (who hated the experience) is a compelling presence.

THE GUARDIAN