Casanova's Women (17 page)

Born in 1725, the real Lucrezia d'Antoni was nineteen years old in 1744 – around the same age as Casanova's Angelica Monti. In common with his Angelica, Lucrezia d'Antoni was married in the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in January 1745. Hers was the only marriage to take place in the church that month, and she and her husband, Filippo Tomassi (Casanova's Don Francesco), later named their first child Angelica, as Casanova was well aware when he was writing his memoirs.
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The real Lucrezia's older sister, Anna Maria d'Antoni, was the ‘Donna Lucrezia' of the memoirs. Born in 1715 in Rome, Anna Maria was married in 1734 to a man named Alessio Vallati – ‘Donna Lucrezia's' lawyer husband Castelli. When she met Casanova in 1744 Anna Maria was in her late twenties and had been married for ten years, long enough for her and her husband to have settled into a comfortable relationship devoid of jealousy. After so long a period of childlessness, the birth of a daughter must have been a blessed event that might, perhaps, have solved the Vallatis' inheritance problems. No matter who her biological father was, Leonilda was wanted by both her parents.

Her biological father never stopped wanting her. And what Casanova wanted, he usually got eventually, as we shall see later.

The duty of a lover is to force the object of his love to surrender to him.
¹

HE WAS NEITHER a son nor a daughter to his mother. He bore no relation to his sisters. The boy he called brother was his son, but he was no father to him. The youth who called him brother wore a dress, but was no brother to him. In short, he was a man who was not a man and whose purpose in life it was to be a woman.

Bellino's life was a riddle that is believed to have inspired Balzac to write
Sarrasine
, a novel about mistaken sexual identities, and Casanova was as confused by it as anyone else. Entranced by Bellino's beauty, he was nevertheless deeply disturbed by the desire he felt for him. For although underneath his skirt Bellino was built like a man, his face, hands and even his tiny breasts were utterly feminine.

Casanova was in no mood for conundrums when he met Bellino in February 1745. Just weeks away from his twentieth birthday, he had stopped off at the Adriatic port of Ancona on his way back to Venice from Rome. To his dismay, almost his disbelief, he had had to leave the city only a few months after arriving there in Donna Lucrezia's company. The great Cardinal Acquaviva, in whose suite the young priest had planned to build his future, had sacked him from his post as a secreatary.

The cause of his dismissal had been a woman – Barbaruccia Dalacqua, the daughter of his French teacher, whom he had got to know when he had visited her father's house as a student. For once
this was not a romantic liaison, for Barbaruccia was involved with another of her father's pupils, who was not in a position to marry her. When Dalacqua found his daughter in bed with her lover, he banned the student from the house, and that might have been the end of the affair had not Barbaruccia discovered that she was pregnant. The lovers decided to elope, but at the last minute their plan was discovered and the young man was arrested. Pursued by the authorities herself, Barbaruccia fled in disguise to Casanova's rooms in the Palazzo di Spagna and threw herself on his mercy. Since he could never resist a tearful woman in distress, particularly when she was a beauty like Barbaruccia, Casanova hid her overnight and arranged for her to plead her case in front of the cardinal the following morning. Since nothing could be kept secret for long in Rome, the affair soon became the talk of the city and, although Acquaviva recognised that his protégé had acted entirely honourably, Casanova's position was compromised to such an extent that the cardinal had no alternative but to let him go.

This was the account of his departure from Rome that Casanova included in his memoirs, but it may well have hidden a less flattering, more truthful version of the event. His friend the Prince de Ligne, one of the few people to read the manuscript of
Story of My Life
before its publication, noted of the affair that Casanova ‘takes away the mistress of the nephew of the Pope and, about to be assassinated, makes his escape'.
²
So had his irrepressible sexuality, rather than his disinterested kindness, led to his downfall? Whatever the real reason, overnight Casanova's meteoric rise in the Catholic Church had become a catastrophic fall. The nineteen-year-old novice was ‘in despair, for I loved Rome, and being on the great road to fortune I saw myself thrown off it without knowing where to go and bereft of all my hopes' .
³
When Cardinal Acquaviva generously offered him letters of recommendation to any city in the world he chose to go to, Casanova named Constantinople on the spur of the moment. Armed with the cardinal's letters, plus a generous pay-off of one hundred gold Spanish doubloons, he left for Venice, where he planned to set sail for the East.

Reaching Ancona at the tail-end of the carnival season, Casanova checked into the best tavern; he may have lost his job, but since he still had money in his pocket he saw no reason to sacrifice his newly-acquired sense of self-importance. The inn was crowded with visitors, his temper was frayed, and within minutes of his arrival he became embroiled in an argument with the innkeeper. To calm him down a Castilian army officer named Sancho Pico invited Casanova to accompany him to one of the rooms where they could listen to music and meet a person he described as the ‘first actress' or
prima donna
at the local theatre. Sancho Pico was being ironic: Bellino was no
prima donna
, he was a young castrato engaged as
primo uomo
, or first man, at Ancona's La Fenice opera house.

Italy's castrati were the celebrities of their time, flamboyant and often temperamental singers who dominated the popular genre of
opera seria
. The leading male and female roles were written for them, they were treated with the deference of modern divas, and were paid the highest salaries of any performers in the operatic world. Revered as they were, the very existence of castrati was an anachronism, for the removal of the testicles was an illegal operation in Italy. Even so, it was carried out hundreds of times every year to preserve the high singing voices of poor boys whose parents sold them to the music masters or conservatories that trained them. Due to the high penalties for performing a castration – death to the surgeon, excommunication to anyone associated with it – the mutilations usually took place in secret, or using the excuse that they were medically necessarily. No one wanted to own up to removing a young singer's testicles, as musicologist Dr Charles Burney discovered when, on a trip to Italy in the early 1770s, he attempted to discover the centre of the practice: ‘I was told at Milan that it was at Venice; at Venice that it was at Bologna; but at Bologna the fact was denied, and I was referred to Florence; from Florence to Rome, and from Rome I was sent to Naples.'
⁴
The two main centres of castration were rumoured to be Naples and Bologna, and it was from Bologna that Bellino and his family hailed.

Due to a strict interpretation of St Paul's interdict that
mulier taceat in ecclesia
– women should be silent in church – which had almost certainly been intended to prevent women from taking part in theological discussions, women had been banned from singing in church services or performing in public theatres since at least the sixteenth century. So whenever a female voice was called for in a musical score, impresarios had to employ a young choir boy or, better still, a male singer who had been castrated before puberty to prevent his voice from breaking. The castrato voice was said to be superior to that of a baritone, a tenor and even a female soprano, for it melded the high vocal range and angelic sweetness of a young boy's voice with the power and resonance of a fully-grown man's. In acting ability, too, many audiences felt that castrati were superior to the women they were impersonating. ‘A double pleasure is given, in that these persons are not women, but only represent women,' wrote Goethe of them. ‘The young men have studied the properties of the female sex in its being and behaviour; they know them thoroughly and reproduce them like an artist; they represent, not themselves, but a nature absolutely foreign to them.'
⁵
Frenchman Charles de Brosses had a far more down-to-earth opinion of Italy's castrated singers: ‘Except for one or two, all I have heard seem to be miserable,' he wrote of them. ‘It is not worthwhile forfeiting one's personal property for the right to chirp like that.'
⁶

During the seventeenth century the strict rules regarding female performers had relaxed in much of Italy. In the sexually-liberated climate of the Venetian Republic, for instance, actresses had taken part in plays as early as the 1630s, and one hundred years later singers such as Senator Malipiero's favourite Teresa Imer regularly performed alongside the castrati whenever operas were staged. In the Papal States, however, the large band of territories across central Italy which fell under the direct authority of the Pope and which included Ancona, the ban against women performers remained very much in force. Given a choice between employing actresses with loose morals or turning a pragmatic blind eye to the illegal mutilation of male singers, the latter option was considered
the lesser evil, even in the Vatican: as late as the 1780s more than two hundred castrati were employed in Rome's churches, and they even performed in the pope's private chapel.

Far from discouraging immorality in the Papal States, the presence of so many castrati had the opposite effect of encouraging homosexuality, a sexual practice that was tolerated far more in Italy and France than it was in England, the American colonies, Spain and, in particular, the Dutch Republic, where those suspected of committing sodomy were ruthlessly persecuted, tried, and put to death. In Rome, a city where thousands of unattached male clerics lived without women, a cardinal could share his bed with another man without arousing suspicion or disapproval, and the soft features, smooth skin and curvaceous bodies of the castrati cast their spell over even heterosexually-inclined men. Often exceptionally tall and handsome, with unusually long legs and arms, castrati combined the beauty of male youths with the voluptuous figures and grace of women. Well aware of their special charms, they did not hesitate to make full use of them: when Casanova mistook one beautiful castrato he spotted in a Roman café for a woman, he reported that ‘the impudent fellow looks at me, and says that if I want to spend the night with him, he'll serve me equally well either as a girl or a boy.'
⁷
On another occasion the adventurer found the well-known castrato Giovanni Osti as seductive-looking as any woman: ‘Squashed into a tight-fitting corset, he had the figure of a nymph, and one saw few women with breasts as firm and sweet as his. The illusion he created was irresistible. One was stopped in one's tracks, overcome with admiration ... It was evident that, as a man, he wanted to encourage the love of those who loved him as such, and who would perhaps not have loved him if he had not been a man; but that he also wished to inspire love in those who, to fall in love with him, needed to think that he was a real woman. Rome, the Holy City, which thus makes pederasts of all humanity, neither wishes to admit it nor to recognise an illusion which it does everything in its power to create in the minds of the audience.'
⁸

The perks of being a castrato could almost be said to outweigh
the obvious disadvantages. At the musical conservatories they received a rigorous education, and since they were thought to be more susceptible to illness than ordinary boys they were given better food and allowed more heating in their dormitories. Once a castrato was trained his potential earning power was without equal. In 1738 in Naples the castrato Senesino received four times more than the composers' salaries, even though he was a painfully wooden actor; and in 1769
alto castrato
Gaetano Guardagni – famous for stopping mid-aria to lecture his inattentive audiences on their behaviour – was paid a phenomenal £1,150 by the King's Theatre in London, and dared to ask for a rise of £450 the following year. Castrati were in demand at the courts and theatres of London, Vienna, Dresden, Berlin and Paris, where they were feted by dukes, duchesses and government ministers. Even royalty bowed down before them: in 1772 it was said that the ex-Electress of Saxony visited Bologna expressly to have lunch with seventy-year-old Carlo Farinelli; and after he had played the harpsichord and sung for her, the Electress kissed him and ‘told him that henceforth she could die happy'.
⁹

In 1745 Bellino was about fifteen years old. Taking advantage of his relative inexperience, the impresario at Ancona's La Fenice theatre paid him only a pittance for performing during the Carnival. By late February, the singer's family, who consisted of his mother, two younger sisters and a younger brother who was employed at the all-male theatre as a ‘ballerina', had spent everything they had earned on their living expenses, and feared that they would have to walk back to their home in Bologna when the Carnival was over, begging for alms along the road. But far from being crushed by their terrible poverty, the family compensated for it by being vivacious, gregarious and affable. As theatre people they were used to charming money out of wealthy strangers, and when Sancho Pico brought Casanova, who was still dressed in his smart Roman
abate'
s clothes, to their room in the inn they took him to be a rich man. No one could have known from his wardrobe, his conversation and the self-important way he carried himself that the
highly-educated young priest was an actors' son himself with no money in the world other than the pay-off his ex-employer had recently given him.

Bellino's family enchanted Casanova from the first moment he entered their room. The mother was jolly and welcoming, her eleven-and twelve-year-old daughters, Marina and Cecilia, were pretty, unselfconscious children who were both studying to go on the stage, and their brother Petronio was a cheeky, effeminate youth. The castrato eclipsed them all in Casanova's eyes: though less gregarious than the others he was ‘ravishingly handsome' and so feminine-looking that Casanova found it difficult to believe that he was really of the male sex. When Bellino sat down at his harpsichord and began to play and sing with an angelic voice embellished with enchanting
fioriture
, his black eyes sparkled with a fire that scorched the young priest's soul. Casanova's desire for Bellino disturbed him, but only mildly, for he was convinced that there must be a woman's body hiding underneath the youth's male garments.