Free Casanova's Women by Judith Summers

on her journey.
    Beautiful, gregarious, and for ever unattainable, Zanetta came into her son’s life, captivated him, and then abandoned him – a pattern of behaviour which he himself would later emulate with many of the women who loved him. Six months after she had turned up in Padua, she summoned him to Venice in order to bid farewell to him yet again. This time she was leaving the Republic for good. Her destination was Dresden, where she had been offered a lifetime engagement in the service of Augustus III, the Elector of Saxony, King of Poland since 1733 and an ally of Anna Ivanova in the war of Polish succession. Though she had been living with her other children since her return from Russia – Francesco was now ten years old, Giovanni seven, Maria five and Gaetano just three – Zanetta had spent less than seven days in total with Giacomo since the night of his ninth birthday. This did not stop him feeling resentful at her departure, particularly when he discovered that she was taking his brother Giovanni to Dresden with her. When they boarded the boat to the mainland Giovanni ‘wept like a desperateman, which made me think that he was not at all intelligent, for there was nothing tragic about the departure,’ Casanova recalled bitterly in his memoir. ‘He was the only one of us who owed all his fortune to our mother, even though he was not her favourite.’ 13
    Zanetta and Giovanni settled happily in Dresden. The city on the banks of the River Elbe was then in its golden age, and housed what her eldest son later described as ‘the most brilliant court in all of Europe’. 14 An explosion of baroque architecture had taken place since the dawn of the eighteenth century and, stylistically if not in size, Dresden now rivalled Vienna in magnificence. Here, among Balthasar Permoser’s flamboyant sculptures and Matthaus Pöppelmann’s elegant buildings, Zanetta made her permanent home, which she would only ever leave to follow the court to Warsaw, or to seek temporary refuge in Prague during the Seven Years War.
    She never returned to Venice, not even when her seventy-three-year-old mother fell gravely ill in the first weeks of 1743. Marcia Farussi died on 18 March, having been cared for during her illness by Giacomo and the other grandchildren whom she had looked after so devotedly for so many years. Even then, Zanetta did not visit her bereaved children, the youngest of whom, Gaetano, was still only nine. Instead, a month after her mother’s death she wrote to her priest and protector, Alvise Grimani, asking him to sell off the family house in the Calle della Commedia on her behalf, along with all its contents. With the money the sale raised, Grimani was to settle the children separately in respectable boarding houses in the city. Seventeen-year-old Giacomo was outraged by the thought of losing his home. ‘When I learned that I would no longer have a house at the end of the year, and that all the furniture was to be sold, I no longer stinted myself in my needs,’ he later wrote. His anger boiled over into open rebellion: ‘I had already sold some linen, tapestries and porcelain; I now made it my business to sell the mirrors and the beds. I knew that people would disapprove, but this was my father’s inheritance, upon which my mother had no claim; I regarded myself as the master of the house. As for my brothers, we could discuss it later.’ 15
    Casanova’s fury towards his mother is evident in every word. If she had a favourite among her children it was clearly not he. Other women would later fall at his feet, but Zanetta had never shown him much affection. Perhaps she now sensed her eldest son’s anger or felt guilty for her lack of maternal feeling, for from the safe distance of Dresden she used her influence to procure him a good position in the Church. Bernardo de Bernardis, a Calabrian by birth, was a Minimite monk she had met in the city. He