I know I missed Valentine’s Day, but there were some things I wanted to cover. That’s why The word of the week is: loquacious.
According to Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary, to be loquacious is to “be full of excessive talk”; to be too wordy and babble on incessantly, in other words. Used in a sentence: “The math teacher talked loquaciously whilst her class watched the clock.”
The subject of the week is: Giacomo Casanova
Giacomo Casanova was the famous Venetian adventurer, and I use the term in its widest possible context, of the 18th century. By his own accounts he made love to around 122 different women after losing his virginity at 16 to two sisters. To list all his lovers and their stories here would take far more space than I intend to use, but in a bizarre turn of events he ends up in bed with his daughter and her mother, whom he had “met” many years before.
According to a research site made by Dickinson University in Pennsylvania; Casanova was born in 1725 and died in 1798.
All throughout his remarkable life he traveled all around Europe. He had to keep on moving often because of some scandal or financial problem. Several times he had to escape debts and he did so by running away to another place in Europe, where if he got lucky he would find someone to give him some money or a position in their household.
During his travels of Europe he met many famous people of the time period. Pope Clement XIII, Catherine the Great, Frederick the Great, Mozart, and Voltaire are but some of the people he met. During his life Casanova was most famous for an incident in which he came unharmed out of a duel with a Polish nobleman, Xavier Branicki.
He wore many different hats during his lifetime. He served as a spy, a business man, a concert violinist, a “gentleman”, and a copious writer in his long life.
Casanova, oddly enough considering his sexual debauchery, was a religious man. Several times he attempted a career in the church. After Voltaire died he published a book critical of Voltaire, due to his religious views.
He wrote nearly 24 books in his lifetime, and nine books were published after his death. The subjects he wrote on varied from theories on mathematics to histories of Poland. One of his books resulted in him getting kicked out of Venice for a time due to it being a thinly disguised assault on a person who had publicly called his courage into question.
The reason Casanova was such a prodigious writer is because with many of his books he was hoping to garner the attention of someone who could help him. He wrote several books supporting his home city of Venice so that they would repeal his final exile, which they did, but after 1785 Casanova never saw his beloved Venice again.
Casanova ended his life in sorrow as a castle librarian in the Czech Republic, having no better options. His final years were spent in depression and the only cure for him was to write his memoirs: Histoire de ma vie. After he died on June 4 1798, his memoirs were published, but were badly translated, with the translator having different opinions than Casanova. The first reliable version was printed in 1960.So that is the famous lover Casanova.