Stenio Solinas

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Stenio Solinas

Prague - The guide has a handsome face and the body of a housewife. She only speaks Czech but the paintings, the items and the furniture translate what shes says. An eighteenth-century music is played as a background, underlining the theatricality of a place where nothing or almost nothing is like it was once.

The bedroom houses a lounge suitable for a person of average height, not for a man, like the legitimate dweller, was nearly 1.90 metres high. On the wall, the nude of Louison O' Morphy, the favourite of Louis XV and of the man who commissioned the picture. A concealed door leads into another room, where there is a man sitting at his desk and working. It is Casanova, or better the dummy of Giacomo Casanova, who is writing the “Histoire de ma vie...”.
Casanova went to Dux, today called Duchov, a city located at the north, between the Czech Republic and Germany, when he was sixty.
In the nearby church of Santa Barbara, Casanova is immortalized by an inscription “Jakob Casanova - Venedig 1725- Dux 1798”; in front of the church, a low building, the Pension-Restaurance Casanova also commemorates him.

Last year, on the occasion of Casanova's bicentenary, a collection was set up at the Lobkovic palace where manuscripts, letters, first editions, the archives of the Waldstein-Wartenberg family and Karl Clary's diaries were displayed.
In the State Archives, Casanova's literary heritage still has to be exhaustively analyzed and interpreted. In short, there is everything necessary to reconstruct the twilight of a life and the environment surrounding it.
What is certain is that it was a gilded twilight in a refined setting. For his work as a librarian, Casanova was assigned an income that was only inferior to that of the agent of the earl Waldstein in Vienna and the land surveyor. Casanova's literary legend began from Dux.

Here his followers saw him as a protagonist on the occasion of meetings, feasts, rendezvous and parties in Prague, Dresden, Hornì Litvìnov and the Teplice thermal baths.
A document recently found from the Teplice post office, where the high postal charges paid by the administrators of the Waldstein family are listed, testifies to Casanova's plentiful correspondence with both men and women, dealing with subjects such as philosophy and politics. This happened in Prague, which inspired Da Ponte and Mozart for the libretto of Don Giovanni.
As far as Dux is concerned, this was a comfortable aristocratic residence with a vast and well-kept park, small lakes, fountains and works of art of which there are still some remains. Here Casanova carried out a frantic activity of writer which is testified by the thousands pages of the “Histoire de ma vie”, a masterpiece that defies the centuries.

“Casanova e la malinconia” (Einaudi) is the title of the book by Giorgio Ficara recently published in Italy, and “Casanova” is the essay-novel written by Andrew Miller (Sceptre) and published in England; this novel was among the best-selling books for some weeks.
These works are part of that literature on Casanova's decline whose initiator was “Ritorno di Casanova” by Arthur Schnitzler.
Yet, the “Histoire de ma vie” is neither the book of a loser nor the testament of an old man. Philippe Sollers, the author of “Casanova” (published by Il Saggiatore), defines his author as a “a philosopher in action” and describes his libertinism as innocent, not blind or selfish. But the man who has been able to perfectly describe that combination of joie de vivre, love for adventure, sensation of immortality and desire of greatness that make up a unicum was the Hungarian Sàndor Màrai, whose book “L'amante del sogno” will be published by Adelphi.

With the sensitiveness typical of the great novelist, Màrai analyzes Casanova taking into consideration all those characteristics that a number of sociologists, historians and psychologists have obscured, complicated or denied. “A man who was a man, who was a male and nothing else, as an oak is nothing but an oak and a rock is simply a rock. A man whose desire was nothing but to give and take, without hurry and without avidity, because he had devoted to the attraction of life all his life, all his nerves and all the sparkles of his mind and body. This type of man was the rarest apparition of the human race”.

A sentimental and philosophical novel, “L'amante del sogno” also correctly describes Casanova as a loving man, not as a sex machine.
We are therefore very far from the summary Fellinesque judgement: “a fascist bastard”.
Like every real libertarian, Casanova was an aristocrat: he knew that the conscient transgression of few men may turn into the irresponsible excess of many.

Like every real anarchist, he was an orderly man; for him, punishment was a necessary harm, an antidote for those who are not able to control themselves. Like every real libertine, he was a moralist: passions must be controlled, and who is not able to do that simply becomes a pervert. In the two bedrooms that were his last residence, a showcase contains an inscription in Italian that says: “Marble that sustained Casanova's steps in San Samuele in Venise, today testify in Dux, for all those who love him, that Giacomo never died”.