"Giacomo Casanova was one of the most beguiling and controversial individuals of his or any age. Braggart or perfect lover? Conman or genius? He made and lost fortunes, founded state lotteries, wrote forty-two books, and 3600 pages of memoirs recording the tastes and smells of the years before the French Revolution - as well, of course, as his affairs and sexual encounters with dozens of women and a handful of men. His energy was dazzling. " "Historian Ian Kelly draws on previously unpublished documents from the Venetian Inquisition, by Casanova, his friends and lovers, which give new insights into his life and world. His research spans eighteenth-century Venice, Paris, St Petersburg, Moscow, Rome, Prague and the Czech castle where Casanova lived, wrote and died. This is the story of a man, but also of the book he wrote about himself. His own memoirs have brought him two centuries of notoriety. "--Jacket.