Books from the attic: not to delegitimize their value, but to indicate a location
If you look for them online you will find the edition I have in my hand, of today’s book, it is the latest from 1992, by Garzanti, twenty years ago, but there are also editions from thirty, forty years ago.
They are valuable books that can certainly enter the world of celluloid; there was a film about Casanova by Federico Federico Fellini, in 1976 with the actor Donald Sutherland in the role of the Venetian writer, and in 2005 it was again a film directed by Lasse Hallström starring the handsome Heath Ledger who in the film also juggles the spade.
Fellini’s film is entirely down and the cover image portrays a scene. Another link takes you back to the film in 2005, thirty years later, a feuilleton full of scene twists for an uneducated audience, very far from Fellini’s style
I started from the present because we realize what the value of the work of art means in an absolute sense.
Almost as if, in a sort of journalistic investigation, even if transposed over time, we wanted to protect their rights.
Because Casanova did not have any notoriety or success in his life, much less in death.
Success that instead came to the autobiographical work, but which manifested itself two centuries after the author’s death.
All his literary and philosophical work relegated to university libraries more for editorial than cultural weight.
Typical of the authors encountered in the 19th century, but what about this self-styled seducer who lived and died in the 18th century, albeit at the end of the century (1725-1798)?
Difficult times, courts full of intrigue, it is no coincidence that the same author ends up in the Piombi of Venice, from which he escaped in 1756 and with the memories of this escape he achieved some notoriety.
What we have in our hands, his memoirs, is defined as a “true” work, that is, one in which the author instills his entire self. the Histoire, was written in the last years of his life and the reason is simple: in fact he himself stated, in a letter of 1791 addressed to Zuan Carlo Grimani, whom he had offended many years before and who had been the cause of the second exile :
“… now that my age makes me believe I have finished doing it, I have written the story of my life…”.
Many argue that most intimate encounters are imaginary. We have no evidence of how to blame them, but it is also true that we are faced with a narrator.
This aspect was acutely observed by a contemporary memoirist, Prince Charles Joseph de Ligne, who wrote that Casanova’s charm lay entirely in his autobiographical stories, both verbal and transcribed, that is, both the salon narration and the printed version of his adventures.
He was as brilliant and enthralling when he spoke about his life – observes de Ligne – as he was terribly boring, verbose, banal when he spoke or wrote on other subjects.
This explains why it wasn’t successful. Which contemporary would have taken any interest in the events of the alcoves in the palaces of the nobility?
Or the love affairs of someone who traveled with a lot of free time available?
It is obvious that Casanova never wanted to accept this situation and suffered tremendously from not having the literary or rather scientific recognition he aspired to.
And that would arrive two hundred years later with the representation of his nocturnal raids.
From the preface to the book, by Maurizio Costanzo, I would like to make a note:
“Casanova was much more – than the characters of the boulevard theater or the foolish local ganimedies who in the intertwining of relationships with adulterers, are on guard for the arrival of their respective partners – he was brazen, regardless of rules and disciplines, a nomad . But above all one who imagines that love activity – compared to males in permanent and effective service who are disposable lovers – must above all involve the head”.
One more reason to read the book by this traveller, son of a dancer-actor, perhaps Spanish, and of a good actress mentioned by Carlo Goldoni.
Casanova in his raids, introduces us to the eighteenth century, characters, graceful girls, houses, landscapes and sex, even if, as eroticism, it is very refined, even ennobled by an elegant writing. After all, this is what he is remembered for and we don’t investigate anything else.
THE NET
