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Carnevale Venezia 2025
Brigitte Lirc
Pietro Mazzi
Il tempo di Casanova -The Time of Casanova
Venice Carnival 2025
“L’amore è un divino fanciullo che aborre la vergogna”
Giacomo Casanova
The Venice Carnival 2025 paid tribute to one of the most captivating figures in European history, Giacomo Casanova, with the theme Il tempo di Casan”e of Casanova), marking the 300th anniversary of his birth. A seducer, writer, and tireless traveller, a symbol of intellectual freedom, Casanova turned his own life into a work of art—shaped by desire, wit, and mystery.
Venice was his natural stage. Amid silent canals, palaces washed in moonlight, and masks concealing identities, the city offered him the perfect setting in which to live each day and every night as the script of an unrepeatable tale.
Arrested on 26 July 1755 and imprisoned in the dreaded Piombi prison within the Palazzo Ducale, he was sentenced to five years of confinement. Yet on 1 November 1756 he staged a legendary escape through the roof, vanishing without a trace—perhaps fleeing by gondola along the city’s canals. Legend even has it that his first act of freedom was to sit down for a coffee at the iconic Florian.
Casanova was, without question, a man who fell in love with his own myth: he created it to carve out a place in the world, only to become ensnared by it in the end.
The inquisitors, unable to tolerate the theatrical audacity and mockery embodied in his escape, launched a manhunt and forced him beyond the borders of the Republic of Venice. Thus began his life as a cosmopolitan adventurer—Paris, London, Poland, Moscow. During his exile he seduced noble and wealthy women alike and moved among the great figures of his age, from Voltaire and Mozart to Benjamin Franklin, Pope Clement XIII, Frederick the Great, and Catherine the Great.
Eighteen years later he was granted a pardon and returned to Venice. To survive, he offered his services as a spy to the very inquisitors who had once condemned him. His reports were never particularly distinguished, and the collaboration faded away due to “poor performance.” Left without means, he devoted the final years of his life to writing.
Three centuries on, in 2025, Venice revived the spirit of Giacomo Casanova, opening the carnival on 14 February—Valentine’s Day—with a celebration of love in Piazza San Marco. The city thus became a journey back to the eighteenth century, inspired by Histoire de ma vie, the autobiography in which Casanova recounts his adventures, passions, and celebrated escape.
Carnival is a singular moment in which to experience Venice. From the Arsenale to the islands of the lagoon, La Serenissima celebrates its most audacious and refined identity: water parades along the Grand Canal, street performances, commedia dell’arte, music, historical dances, and spectacles that weave together tradition and contemporaneity.
This was my ninth carnival in Venice, since the first one I attended in 1992. This photographic gallery—together with the videos that accompany it on my YouTube channel—seeks to capture the essence of The Time of Casanova: glances hidden behind masks, costumes inspired by the Settecento, lights shimmering on the water, and the eternal magic of a city that, like Casanova himself, can unfold in a single day countless moments of seduction, reveal unexplored angles filled with charm, inspire a uniquely romantic prose, and, without asking permission, gently deceive us into falling boundlessly in love with life and art.
Pablo Munini,© Milano January 2026
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