Lover Boy

The handsome fellow above is on Giacomo Casanova born this day 1725, in Venice, Italy. He was born the eldest of an actress mother, and a actor/dancer of a father, though he himself thought that perhaps his father was someone else. Whoever his parents were, they shipped him off to a boarding house in Padua when he was nine, this was not something that he was going to remember fondly. The boarding house was such a shithole, that he requested to be taken into his primary tutor, the Abbe Gozzi. It was in this household that he first encountered the opposite sex. The Abbe's younger sister was the first woman to experience the Casanova experience, though she was not to be the last by far. He was a very bright child, and at the age of 12 he entered the University of Padua, and graduated from there at the age of 17 with a degree in law (which he felt "an unconquerable aversion," join the club big boy). His life makes some damn fine reading, and he wrote it down himself in a 12 volume epic called the "Story of My Life." He managed to obtain minor orders in the church, obtain a massive gambling habit, and eventually get his ass arrested and tossed into Venice's worst prison "The Leads." There he was tossed into the worst cell they could find, where he was kept company by a million fleas. His escape from that prison became the source of a best selling book "The Story of My Flight." He lived the playboy lifestyle to the fullest, and his name would become a byword for womanizers throughout the world. He spent his last years as a librarian (of all things) to a minor nobleman in Bohemia, and writing his highly entertaining memoirs. His last years are the subject of an excellent book "Casanova in Bolzano," by Sandor Marai. He died on June 4th, 1798, after finishing his memories, that detail his long, love filled life. So for showing us how to properly seduce a woman, and being an all around cad, Giacomo Casanova (April 2nd 1725-June 4th, 1798, at the age of 73), you are my (221st) hero of the day.