Giacomo. A love story
A water show that is an emotional journey through the life of Giacomo Casanova, born 300 years ago, hated and loved citizen of the Most Serene Republic.
The show celebrates the life of this eclectic, extravagant and transgressive character, through the memories of Henriette, the only woman Casanova ever truly loved.
A succession of paintings and evocative images that contain the essence of Giacomo Casanova. Seven chapters between reality and fantasy, events and dreams, that narrate a personality who made a Carnival of his life by overturning social rules.
Chapter One: COMETS
Comets, exceptional creatures bearing lights and shadows,
strange and different individuals.
Perhaps celebrated, but long misunderstood.
Never indifferent.
Who are you, Giacomo Casanova,
citizen of the Republic of Venice.
Loved or hated, absolved or condemned?
Born in Venice three hundred years ago in Calle della Commedia,
incarnated in the restless womb of Zanetta, a renowned actress.
The bright goddess of the child you once were.
Let yourself now be reached by me, my soul.
By me, Henriette, the lover you longed for, throughout your life.
I loved you too. Did you ever doubt it?
We met in the mid-eighteenth century at the Carnival in Venice, my soul.
Venice which is a dream, a surprise, amazement.
A Carnival, the beginning of this story.
Chapter Two: YOUR LIFE
Now I see your life, Giacomo.
A magic lantern casting light on the backdrop
where rises, in all its chaos,
the city on water that the whole world speaks of.
Venice the Most Serene, land of love and deceit
of epic battles and resounding defeats
of lavish celebrations and grand funerals
predator and shield of the Mediterranean Sea.
Now, I wish to delve deeper into what you truly were,
a transgressive, encyclopaedic creature of that 18th-century
that, with a dancer’s step, swept history off its feet.
You were a playwright, writer, poet, philosopher. Scientist!
Giacomo the adventurer, the Freemason, the diplomat
the gambler, the secret agent, the spy.
Casanova is the prolific scholar, the alchemist and esoteric
the mathematician who transforms.
To all, unavoidably, the tireless seducer.
Chapter Three: THE ADVENTURE
Imprisoned for the crime of necromancy
you, Giacomo, contested in vain the unjust punishment.
With the desire for freedom and the longing for love,
you escaped from where no one could flee.
In your most famous adventure,
the escape from the Piombi prison.
By outwitting the jailers,
you sharpened a tool to carve
through the hard plaster of the cell ceiling.
Then from the roof of the Doge’s dwelling
you entered the nocturnal labyrinth of the palace of thousand rooms.
Impudent. Bold. Presumptuous. Trembling, desperate and tired. But irreducible.
Rebellious. Stubborn. Sassy.
Fearless you took the exit.
You reached the pier where a gondola was waiting for you to take you towards the mainland.
Ah, freedom, which without love is powerless
Love, which without freedom cannot fly.
After the dark dungeon, freedom at last, freedom!
Chapter Four: THE TRAVELER
All around Italy, and across all of Europe, you wandered through courts and palaces more than a hundred cities.
Paris, Vienna, Warsaw, Geneva, Amsterdam, London to St Petersburg and on to Latvia and Lithuania, and down across the Pyrenees to Marseilles, Madrid, Pamplona, Barcelona, Corfu and Constantinople.
Yet, as a swindler, you also frequented dive bars and brothels, in good company, favouring maids and dames of every rank.
It was you, between Dresden and Prague, who helped Mozart complete,
ironically, that Don Giovanni with whom you are often confused.
But you loved! Don Giovanni, instead, loved to collect.
In your youth, you played the violin in the theatre Goldoni directed,
learning to deal with servants and nobles, senators and ambassadors.
You duelled in words with Voltaire and Rousseau, meeting counts, marquises and emperors, adventurers, gentlemen and ladies.
Catherine of Russia, Crébillon, d’Alembert, Abbot Voisenon, the Count of Cagliostro.
Even a Pope was your friend—only few know you once were an abbot!
That Benedict XIV who allowed you to read forbidden books: Copernicus, Descartes, Giordano Bruno
That Pope performed great works of charity, knowing that saying Mass, breaking hosts, and preaching was not your calling.
Chapter Five: FREE SPIRIT
“Free spirit,” you called yourself, yet you were devoted to an unknown Goddess.
You did not fear contradicting yourself often, so long as you could explore the new,
knowing that perhaps everything is a dream,
and that transgression is the high jump of intelligence.
Though not a magician of the arcane sciences,
you studied them deeply
to determine the boundary that separates us from the Beyond
and to understand how far one can dare to go.
Giacomo, you were jester of the Golden Book of that nobility
which welcomed you in Venice and eventually rejected you.
You embodied the exception.
You loved scandal above all.
You made a religion out of enjoyment,
with all that the body and spirit can savour in bed.
Judge of your own will
with the subtle pleasure of showing the timid that life is brief.
You, son of an actress, were the first to pass on in literature the knowledge of ancient peoples on Hollow Lands where time stands still.
You rode fantasy alongside the purest physics,
writing of Lost Worlds underground,
where Nature runs wild in other forms
and with incredible creatures.
Chapter Six: EROS
You guessed every women’s longing. Not the gallantry of a cicisbeo
nor languid gazes, or the unsheathing of swords.
As below, so above.
To divine the desire.
Conquests bitten where the skin is thinnest,
leaping from one bed to another,
plunging into flesh for the Alchemy of body and spirit.
But your true seduction was listening,
my Socratic lover.
And the yearning to love.
One single weakness: women in men’s attire.
As you have never forgotten,
at that Carnival I wore a military uniform.
I rather suspect you applied mathematical logic
to the erotic realm,
as chapters of that treatise you entitled:
Magnitude, Mechanics, Form, Balance, Increase, Speed, Nature, Muse,
Reasonings, Illusions, Evidence,
Experiences, Truth!
After having experienced everything,
even he who has tasted it all falls.
Have you calmed down? Are you satisfied?
Or would you wish to start anew?
Or would you return to me today, Giacomo?
Chapter Seven: A LOVE STORY
The finite infinite is our chapter.
Neither man nor woman: both.
We seduced each other in the many names of dreaming.
Once, for us, between us there have been three months of real love.
I fooled myself into thinking you weren’t so important.
You, librarian of dreams,
my secret adventure,
my unfulfilled marriage,
my perfect lover without a body.
My flower without a butterfly, upon you I rest.
Lie down now and rest with me, Giacomo Casanova.
I have returned.
Extinctus amabitur idem.
You said: They will love me when I am dead.
And I love you, alive, in the present.