5
THE RISE OF ROMANCE
“What could be more romantic than Valentine’s Day in Verona?” I ask my dubious husband as I persuade him to visit the hometown of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet for La Festa degli Innamorati (Celebration of Lovers).
“Did Valentine live there?” Bob asks.
“Well, no,” I respond.
The original Valentino served as a Catholic priest in third-century Rome. The emperor, believing that bachelors made better fighters, had outlawed marriage for soldiers. Sympathetic to young couples eager to wed, the compassionate cleric defied the decree and continued to perform weddings.
Thrown into prison, Valentino developed a friendship with a young girl—perhaps his jailer’s daughter—who came to visit him. Some say they fell in love; others claim that he cured her blindness. Before his execution, he sent her a note signed, “Tuo Valentino” (Your Valentine).
Lovers around the world have been using the phrase ever since. Towns throughout Italy celebrate the saint’s day, but the festivities have never morphed into an Americanized card-sending, rose-buying, candy-giving lollapalooza.
ON THE CRISP SUNSHINY DAY, Verona, bedecked in red banners and heart-shaped balloons, bustles with smiling couples. At lunch in the charming Antica Torretta, friends tell the romantic story of how they met. Maurizio Barbacini, who went on to international acclaim as an opera conductor, was accompanying his twin brother, a tenor launching his singing career, on the piano at a music festival in Spoleto. Antonella, a twenty-year-old beauty, was performing the lead in Madama Butterfly.
The first time Maurizio saw her, Antonella had a little Pomeranian dog, “red like fire,” and a dress of the same intense color. “I thought either she doesn’t know how to sing or she’s very, very good.” The latter proved true. She won top honors in the competition—and an admirer.
Although Antonella brushed off his initial advances, a smitten Maurizio followed her to her next performance in Milan. “I asked, ‘What are you doing here?’ ” Antonella recalls. “Then for the first time, I looked into his eyes, and I realized that they were the most beautiful blue.”
Il colpo di fulmine (the lightning bolt of love) struck. They married within a year. After four decades together, Maurizio’s blue eyes still light up when Antonella enters a room; she holds his hand as we stroll the cobbled streets that lead to Juliet’s home.
When I ask if Juliet and her Romeo had actually lived in Verona, our friends respond, “Chissà?” (Who knows?). The earliest account of a pair of star-crossed Italian teens—Mario and Gianozza—was set in Siena. A more sophisticated “history of two noble lovers” named Giulietta and Romeus (later Romeo) in Verona appeared in about 1530. Shakespeare plucked his plot from its English translation, and the Veronese happily adopted the romantic duo as their own.
Juliet’s storied balcony, small and low, hunches above a courtyard grimy with spray-painted hearts and lovers’ initials. So many tourists fondled the breasts of Juliet’s statue (for luck in love) that the original had to be replaced with a copy. Couples squeeze up narrow stairs, pause for a selfie on the balcony, and elbow back down.
We extricate ourselves from the crowd and make our way to a dingy side street and an even more disheartening sight: the forlorn entry to Romeo’s house, marked only by a small, rusty plaque. On a bridge crossing Verona’s moat, we pass an iron gate so laden with “love locks” that a concrete support has collapsed, spilling dozens of these tokens of undying commitment across the pavement.
So much for happily ever after.
ROMANCE, AS ITALIANS HAVE ALWAYS KNOWN, requires more than red hearts and flowers. Like every passion worth pursuing and possessing, it demands a price. Even at its most sublime, romantic love remains, as Umberto Eco defined it, a state of “devastatingly unhappy happiness,” part affection and part affliction.
At grand rounds at the University of Pisa, my husband, a professor of psychiatry, hears reports of agitated young men brought to emergency rooms by their worried parents. The youths cannot focus to study or work, nor can they sleep or eat. Many babble incoherently and pace restlessly.
When Bob suggests possible diagnoses, such as mania or drug abuse, his Italian colleagues inform him that these tormented souls are usually suffering the symptoms of love. Asked if he has seen many such cases in the United States, he shakes his head.
“Not a single one.”
Perhaps la passione italiana, with its unique willingness to surrender wholly without hesitation or reservation, makes Italian hearts more vulnerable. In English a heart “breaks” just like a dish, but Italian provides a specific word for its shattering: spezzare. When I ask a friend how he feels after his longtime girlfriend left him, he says, “Mi piange il cuore.” My heart weeps.
Heartbreak, as Italian cardiologists have documented, can prove fatal if it fulminates into the sindrome da crepacuore (syndrome of death by heartbreak). Victims develop symptoms similar to a heart attack, such as chest pain and shortness of breath. Most recover without lasting damage to their hearts, but about 5 percent go into cardiac arrest and die.
TRIBULATIONS OF THE HEART may be as old as time, but Roman writers were the first to document their course and create a true literature of love. In the first century BC, a young man from a provincial town ventured to the Big City, fell in with a fast crowd, swooned for a sophisticated lady, and suffered devastating heartache.
His name was Gaius Valerius Catullus (ca. 84–ca. 53 BC), born into a wealthy family in Verona. Shortly after arriving in Rome at about age twenty, Catullus glanced across a crowded terrace and beheld Clodia Metelli, the noble, smart, bewitching thirty-something wife of a powerful consul. To the infatuated youth, this elegant Romana combined “in one woman the charms of all charming women.” He dubbed her “Lesbia” as a literary tribute to Lesbos, the island where the Greek poet Sappho had rhapsodized about her love for another woman.
“Dammi mille baci!” (Give me a thousand kisses!), Catullus begged. “Then a hundred / Then another thousand, then a second hundred / Then—don’t stop—another thousand, then a hundred…” Yearning to give this beauty as many kisses as there are grains of sand or stars in the sky, Catullus trembled to think of her touch.
“Let’s live, my Lesbia,” he entreated. “Let’s live and love!” When his “shining goddess” yielded, Catullus all but exploded in ecstasy. But he seethed with jealousy of her husband—who conveniently died of unknown causes in his home on the Palatine Hill. As rumors spread that his cheating wife had poisoned him, Catullus fantasized that he and his beloved could live together at last. But she demurred.
“I love, and I hate,” he wrote as Clodia took another lover—several, Catullus contended, fanning his rejection into outrage with images of her in the arms of hundreds of men. “The Lesbia that Catullus loved more than himself and all he owned,” he sniped, “now hangs around the highways and byways jerking off the lordly scions of Remus.” His language may have been coarse, but his insights into love’s delights and disappointments rang true.
Catullus found solace with other lovers, including a comely teenage boy with plump lips to whom he yearned to give three hundred thousand kisses, all tastier than honey—along with other specific sexual favors that he graphically described in verse. His poems inspired a new generation of love-struck writers who immortalized their own romantic escapades.
Although they didn’t explicitly use the word passione, these young poets recognized love’s price and pain. Describing themselves as “wounded,” “wretched,” or “enslaved,” they compared losing your heart to “having your bone marrow on fire.”
With Rome’s fall, Catullus’s works disappeared for almost a thousand years. In the fourteenth century, a single manuscript containing about a hundred of his verses was discovered stopping up a wine barrel—in Verona, which I’ve come to think of as Italy’s literary nido d’amore (love nest).
ONE OF CATULLUS’S ADMIRERS, Publius Ovidius Naso, whom we know as Ovid (43 BC–AD ca. 17), followed his provocative path. His literary masterpiece, Metamorphoses, retells some 250 tales of mythological gods whose passions shattered the lives of hapless mortal victims, such as the virginal nymph Daphne, transformed by her father into a tree to protect her from Apollo’s lust.
For decades, Ovid’s own love life paralleled the randy adventures of his literary creations. Married three times and divorced twice, the sophisticated storyteller eventually settled down at age forty-six to a happy domestic life. Styling himself a “professor of love,” Ovid drew on his own experiences as well as keen observations of his fellow Romans to pen an urbane manual for seduction, Ars amatoria (The Art of Love).
A prototypical advice columnist, he offered practical tips for picking up women (Go to the chariot races and remove an imagined errant thread from an attractive lady’s cloak), enhancing a flat chest (Stuff the band worn around the breasts with soft fabric), and faking an orgasm (Flail! Gasp! Moan!).
The book became the talk of a town that loved talking about love and a field guide to Rome’s age of excess. Ovid’s salacious writings also drew Augustus’s ire. As part of his campaign to curb his citizens’ erotic indulgences, the imperial ruler banned Ovid’s books—which naturally sparked even greater interest in them—and exiled the poet.
Banished to semibarbarous Tomis (in present-day Romania) on the Black Sea, Ovid wept his life away, consoling himself with the reassurance that his words would make him immortal. And so they did. Ovid’s writings, along with those of Catullus, inspired the Tuscan poets of the Middle Ages to create a new genre of romantic verse.
THESE LOVE-STRUCK WRITERS diagnosed themselves with a heart-stopping condition that they called sbigottimento, a state of stupefaction caused by contemplation of one’s beloved. With no hope for a cure, they sought relief in lilting verses inspired by the amorous ballads of traveling French troubadours. Their dolce stil novo (sweet new style) for poetry reveled in the thrill and torment of losing one’s heart, regardless of the risks of this delicious but dangerous passion.
The early romantics idolized a pair of thirteenth-century lovers named Paolo and Francesca, who once lived in a kingdom by the sea. After years of bloody conflict, the lord of Ravenna had sealed a truce by marrying his fair daughter Francesca to a son of the fearsome warrior clan called the Malatesta (literally, “bad” or “evil head”) in nearby Rimini on the Adriatic coast.
According to some accounts, handsome Paolo, Malatesta’s younger son, came to Ravenna to negotiate the nuptial contract. Not until her wedding in or around 1275 did Francesca realize that her groom would be his older lame and brutish brother Gianciotto (“crippled” Johnny).
With Gianciotto away at battle, Paolo, a husband and father, provided protection and companionship for his young sister-in-law. To pass the time, the two “charmed the hours away” by reading together about Galeotto, who had acted as the go-between for the knight Lancelot and Queen Guinevere, wife of King Arthur, in the fantasy kingdom of Camelot. When they reached the description of that pair’s first, adulterous embrace, Paolo breathed “the tremor of his kiss” on Francesca’s welcoming mouth. “That day we read no more,” she would demurely recall.
The liaison continued for several years, until Gianciotto returned unannounced and pounded at the locked bedroom door. Paolo hastily ran for cover, but his cloak snagged, and he couldn’t escape. Not realizing this, Francesca let Gianciotto enter. As he lunged at his brother with his sword, Francesca threw herself between the two men and was killed instantly. Gianciotto pulled his bloody sword from her body and ran it through his brother. The lovers were buried in a single tomb.
We meet the pair in Canto V of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Like other lustful sinners, they whip endlessly around the second circle of the Inferno, propelled by winds as fierce as the passions that buffeted them on earth. Francesca, tethered to Paolo for eternity, describes the desire that overcame her as “amor, ch’a nullo amato amar perdona” (love that permits no one not to love in return). Just about every Italian woman I know recalls a suitor from her youth, often a tongue-tied teen, repeating these words to win her heart.
With his lyrical depiction of Paolo and Francesca, Dante cemented into the hearts of Italians the romantic concept of a love so compelling that it cannot be blocked by ramparts or contained by walls. Like the ancient gods struck by Cupid’s arrows, mortal lovers were powerless in passion’s thrall, which alternately plunged them into despair and raised them up to rapture.
Dante understood this condition well: he lived under its spell.
LOVE’S LIGHTNING BOLT STRUCK Dante (1265–1321) when he was just nine years old. In a neighborhood church in Florence, he beheld a pretty younger girl named Beatrice, a daughter of a distinguished family.
“At that moment,” he remembered, “the spirit of life that hath its dwelling in the most secret chambers of the heart began to beat so violently that the smallest pulses of my body shook.” Although the two seldom saw each other and barely spoke, Dante developed an unrequited yet undying passion.
As was the custom of the time, both Dante and Beatrice entered arranged marriages. Dante’s wife, Gemma, bore at least three children, but neither she nor their offspring merit a single mention in his works. His adored Beatrice died in 1290, a few weeks before her twenty-fifth birthday, probably in childbirth. In La Badia, the sweet little chapel where she is buried, young lovers still leave flowers and notes at her tomb.
Drawn to Florence’s tumultuous politics, Dante was serving as a town prior, a sort of councilman, when civil war ripped the city apart in 1301. Along with other members of his party, Dante was exiled and his house razed. If he were ever to return to his family and the town of his birth, he could be burned alive. The native Florentine found himself penniless, friendless, homeless—as he put it, “a ship without sails or rudder, driven to various harbors and shores by the parching wind that blows from pinching poverty.”
All that sustained Dante was his passion for Beatrice. Unable to touch her in life, the poet believed he could “attain” his unattainable beloved for eternity by “loving her more deeply than most lovers can claim.” With words his only resource, Dante swore “to write of her what has never been written of another woman.” In doing so, he created a template for romantic passion that became an ideal of lovers everywhere.
LONG AFTER I BEGAN STUDYING Italian, I resisted Dante, whose frowning face glared at me from portraits and statues throughout Italy. I assumed his works would be as off-putting as his dour visage. But when, as essential research for La Bella Lingua, I finally read lyrical translations of his work, I learned that behind the scowl beat the heart of an incorrigible romantic.
Asked to identify his credentials as a poet, Dante once replied, “I’m just someone who takes notes when love inspires me.” These “notes” flowered into 14,233 eleven-syllable lines organized into one hundred cantos in three volumes of his Divine Comedy: Inferno (Hell), Purgatorio (Purgatory), and Paradiso (Paradise). Beatrice gleams at the heart of this passion-filled opus.
Every wrought syllable was written, rewritten, polished, and perfected for her. Her eyes, radiant like suns, lead the pilgrim Dante to Paradise, where he discovers the essence of the universe, a divine love more powerful and profound than any earthly imitation. This, as the final line of the Divine Comedy (so named for its happy ending) proclaims, is “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.”
With this epic, Dante spun Tuscany’s lusty, lively vernacular—the people’s tongue—into literary gold: a gleaming new language second to none in its power and profundity, the linguistic base of modern Italian. “Dante vive!” proclaim graffiti in Florence. Dante lives!
He undoubtedly does. More than seven centuries after the bard’s birth, Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith, and bands like Radiohead and Nirvana cite Dante as an inspiration. They join an exalted chorus of famous fans, including William Shakespeare, John Milton, William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and Ezra Pound. No other single piece of literature has generated more research, analysis, commentary, interpretations, or adaptations—all of which keep proliferating “at an alarming rate,” clucks The Cambridge History of Italian Literature.
ROMANTIC PASSION CLAIMED ANOTHER HEART in 1327. In a church in Avignon, where his family fled after the same purge that forced Dante into exile, young Francesco Petrarca, known as Petrarch (1304–1374), beheld the woman who became his muse. Infatuated by nineteen-year-old Laura, whose eyes melted him “as the sun does the snow,” he expressed in his Canzoniere, a book of 366 sonnets, “the boundless love for which there was no cure.”
A natural athlete and voracious scholar, Petrarch traveled and studied throughout Europe. Like many men without inherited wealth, he opted for a career in the Church and took “minor” vows that prohibited marriage. Nonetheless, a series of women streamed through his life, and he fathered at least two children. Like Dante’s family, none of Petrarch’s consorts or children appear in his writings. His heart belonged only to Laura.
Physical love had nothing to do with this platonic passion. Already married when Petrarch first glimpsed her, Laura remained forever beyond his touch—or even his gaze. He seemed almost relieved when she died of the plague around 1348, saying that he no longer had to struggle with “an overwhelming but pure love affair.” A simmering sexual attraction evolved into a spiritual enlightenment that would lead him beyond grief to redemption.
To express the loftiest of emotions, Petrarch and his legions of imitators embroidered eloquent phrases in which water became “liquid crystal” and a beloved an ethereal object of adoration (“the candid rose, thorn-encompassed”). Petrarch continued to polish what he dismissively called his “little songs” throughout his life, transforming them into literary gems.
His contemporaries hailed his verses—far too saccharine and contrived for modern taste—as “pure linguistic oxygen.” Migrating as quickly as quill could copy them, they made all of Europe, in a commentator’s phrase, “sonnet-mad.” Poetry became such a popular passion that Petrarch complained that lawyers, theologians, and even his valet had taken to rhyming and that soon “the very cattle would begin to low in verse.”
Petrarch’s most enduring contribution comes from his translations and commentary on manuscripts from ancient Rome and Greece, which shifted the way people thought about life itself. Rather than seeing earthly existence as a mere way station to eternity, he espoused a fuller view of human dignity and potential. Historians laud the acclaimed thinker as the intellectual father of the Renaissance.
Although contemporary Italian echoes with more “Englishisms” than lyrical turns of phrase, Petrarch’s linguistic influence survives in seductive guises. Once, at the opening of a gallery in Florence, a silver-haired gentleman complimented me in typically Petrarchan style—which I totally misunderstood.
“Che begli occhi!” (What beautiful eyes!), he crooned, lifting my hand almost but not quite to his lips. As he rhapsodized about their green color and mused about whether they were more giada (jade) or smeraldo (emerald), I got lost in his Italian soliloquy. When he seemed to imply that I had an artificial eye, I protested.
“No, signora,” he explained. What he had said was that my eyes seemed made of porcelain, created by an artist greater than any in his native city.
ALTHOUGH MORE WOMEN GAINED LITERACY in the Renaissance, few had an opportunity to write, and even fewer dared to rhapsodize about romance. An outstanding exception, Gaspara Stampa (ca. 1523–1554), considered one of the finest poets of the sixteenth century, broke the stereotype of women as passive recipients of adulation.
Classically educated, Gaspara and her sibling, Cassandra, gained fame in Venice as a sister act, appearing in literary salons to sing, play the lute, and improvise poetry to a medley of tunes. A portrait depicts a young beauty with a laurel wreath on her luxuriant brown hair and a book in her arms, her velvet dress cut low to display creamy shoulders and décolletage.
Writing as the lover rather than the beloved, Gaspara writhed with unrequited passion, just like her male counterparts. The subject of her literary tributes, written in Petrarch’s highly embellished style, was a certain Count Collaltino di Collalto. In 220 poems, she exalts his chiseled visage, praises his noble soul, and delights in the way he filled a room with his aura. Although we don’t know if the two became lovers, Gaspara freely embraces sexual passion in her writing.
“If any woman ever so enjoyed the fire and ice of love, it’s me,” she declares, refusing to hide such intimate feelings. “My delight, my desire, is to live ablaze yet not feel the pain.” Even the torment of her beloved’s indifference brings her bittersweet pleasure, the kind that blues singers understand.
“Reading her poems,” comments Kathleen Gonzalez, author of A Beautiful Woman in Venice, “is like listening to Billie Holiday sing of her love for a man who betrays and leaves her.”
Although the Stampa sisters won praise as talented virtuose, simply performing as entertainers called their reputations—and virtue—into question. Gaspara’s growing recognition fanned the envy of the Venetian equivalent of venomous Internet trolls, who attacked her as an unmarried woman shamelessly writing about sex. A fellow member of her literary academy wrote a vulgar poem calling her a whore and musing about which of the Stampa sisters might be better in bed.
Gaspara’s health began deteriorating in 1553. The following year, she spiked a high fever and developed a racking cough. Fifteen days later, at age thirty-one, she died. Several months after Gaspara’s death, her sister published her poems. Retracting their previous rants, critics hailed the poet as “unique among others,” a woman who extolled an earthbound love that unified body and soul.
IF POETS ALONE HAD THEIR SAY, romantic love might have been mummified in elaborate rhyming schemes. But Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375), the great raconteur who inspired storytellers from Chaucer to Dickens to Twain, never let passion stray far from its earthy roots. The illegitimate son of a Florentine merchant, he tried but failed at careers in banking and law. All that he wanted was to write, eat, and chase women.
While living in Naples, Boccaccio fell for a spirited coquette he called Fiammetta (Little Flame), who ran through his limited funds before leaving him for a richer suitor. He went on to father several illegitimate children and eat his way to an enormous girth. “If anyone ever needed compassion or appreciated it or delighted in it, I’m the guy,” Boccaccio wrote.
In 1348, shortly after his return to Florence from Naples, the Great Pestilence killed a quarter of the townspeople, including Boccaccio’s stepmother and numerous friends. His antidote to this horror was the Decameron, Italian’s first great prose narrative, hailed as “an ode to and of passion in all its sweaty, sexy fullness…a book of the love of life.” In the midst of the greatest disaster that had befallen Italy in a thousand years, Boccaccio managed to find beauty, humor, and goodness.
In this rousing work, a “merry brigade” of seven young women and three young men take refuge in a country villa to escape the plague and swap one hundred tales of love, lust, mischief, and treachery. As they demonstrate, the omnipresent threat of death intensifies a passion for enjoying life to the fullest—drinking, singing, gratifying all cravings, and delighting in sensual joys.
Scamps and schemers, greedy merchants and unrepentant adulterers, gluttonous priests and sex-crazed nuns flit through Boccaccio’s pages. Contrary to the common assumption, only about a quarter of his tales have bawdy themes, but these sparkle with lusty vitality. In one spicy story, a young hermit, instructing a naive young girl, convinces her that she could best serve God by putting the devil, springing to life in his penis, into “hell,” her dark and warm vagina. In a typically boccaccesco spin, the girl becomes so devoted to this form of worship that she wears the poor man out.
BOCCACCIO’S ZESTY STORIES SPREAD as swiftly as the contagion that inspired them. After the guilt-ridden Middle Ages, readers were delighted by his bemused acceptance of all-too-human failings. Who could blame his shameless sinners? As one of his lascivious abbesses declares to justify her transgressions, “It is impossible to defend oneself against the promptings of the flesh.” So why even try?
Yet Boccaccio also appreciated the softer side of romance. In his most poignant tale, a young Florentine named Federigo, whose greatest pride is his noble falcon, spends his entire fortune trying to win the heart of a wealthy married woman, the virtuous Monna Giovanna. After her husband dies, the widow’s young son becomes grievously ill and entreats her for the one thing he thinks would make him well—Federigo’s prized bird.
Monna Giovanna, planning to beg for the falcon, arrives at Federigo’s house at lunchtime. In a twist that foreshadows O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi,” Federigo, embarrassed that he has no food to offer, kills his cherished pet, roasts it on a spit, and serves it to his guest. Monna Giovanna’s son dies, but, moved by Federigo’s selfless deed, she marries the young man, rewarding his sacrifice with both wealth and happiness.
Boccaccio never found a love so true. After two marriages and countless liaisons, his love life soured to such an extent that he derided all women in a misogynist rant. His weight ballooned, and his health deteriorated. Scorning his Decameron and Italian itself, he wrote turgid tomes in Latin and considered burning his works and his library. Petrarch stopped him—and in his will left the impoverished author money to buy himself a warm winter dressing gown.
NOT EVEN THE CHARACTERS in Boccaccio’s raciest tales could match the sexual exploits of the Venetian Giacomo Casanova (1725–1798), whose name became a synonym for seduction. His mother, a popular actress, left her firstborn son with his grandmother and various caretakers as she toured Europe in a traveling theatrical troupe. The odd, sickly child, who didn’t speak until age eight, spent a lifetime searching for love—and found it in the arms of women of encyclopedic variety.
Casanova’s résumé included stints in a seminary (expelled), a post as a secretary to a Spanish cardinal in Rome (fired), and a law degree (never put to use). “The chief business” of his life, he declared, consisted of “cultivating whatever gave pleasure to my senses.” Seduction, which he described as a “thrilling, sometimes dangerous sport played by both sexes,” intrigued him most.
A champion at the game, Casanova could slither his way under any skirt. Like a predatory animal with an omnivorous sexual appetite, he pursued women of every age, status, and size: ladies and chambermaids, girls and grandmothers, tarts and spinsters, nuns and nobles—by some reports, a thirteen-year-old niece and his own illegitimate adult daughter as well.
In time, Casanova’s gambling and whoring tested even Venice’s tolerance, and he was denounced as a Freemason, an atheist, and a dabbler in black magic—serious crimes that landed him in prison. After fifteen months of plotting, he pulled off a seemingly impossible jail break and escaped to Paris.
The clever con artist won a commission from the French government to organize a state lottery, still in existence, based on the Venetian model. This enterprise, along with a silk manufacturing business, proved so lucrative that Casanova acquired a luxurious house, servants, horses, carriages, and a reported twenty mistresses, each ensconced in an apartment of her own.
Although he declared passion for several women, Casanova viewed love as “a kind of madness” and marriage as “the tomb of love.” He preferred to remain footloose. For decades, he hobnobbed with intellectuals, mingled with royals at the British and Russian courts, skipped around Europe (often in flight from debtors or police), fought numerous duels, and once reportedly lost the equivalent of a million dollars in a single night of high-stakes gambling.
Arrested and jailed repeatedly, Casanova returned to Venice a broken man. For a while, he worked as an informer for the Venetian secret police, but a pamphlet he wrote, a vicious satire of the city’s leading citizens, provoked such a scandal that he had to flee again. Homeless and penniless, Casanova became, as a Frenchman who once admired him put it, “a glorious butterfly transformed into a worm.” A charitable friend gave the lonely exile a sinecure as the librarian in his dreary castle in Bohemia.
His health and vitality failing, Casanova suffered from gout, edema, and hemorrhoids as well as severe bladder infections, the legacy of sexually transmitted diseases. His vitality and bravado drained, he began writing his memoirs in 1790 and kept revising drafts until he died eight years later.
“I am writing The Story of My Life as the only remedy to keep from going mad or dying of grief,” he said. His autobiography, stretching over nearly four thousand handwritten pages, along with his little dog, served as Casanova’s only solaces in a wretched old age.
JUST AS I WAS ABOUT to conclude that Italian romances and romancers inevitably end sadly, I came across a story that changed my mind. According to a reputedly historical account, a young woman in fourteenth-century Florence “lived twice”—thanks to the power of true love.
Ginevra degli Amieri, the pretty, spirited nineteen-year-old daughter of a rich merchant, loved and was loved by the commoner Antonio Rondinelli. Her family, according to the custom of the time, arranged a marriage to a well-born and well-to-do Florentine. After her wedding, Ginevra fell into a deep depression, stopped eating, and lost energy and weight.
One morning her husband found his young wife lying motionless in bed, eyes closed, unresponsive to everything around her. Fearing the plague, he quickly had Ginevra’s lifeless body carried to the parish church, where her parents garbed her in white and sobbed through her funeral.
In the dark, cold damp of the family tomb, Ginevra suddenly awakened and called out for help. No one heard her. Somehow, she freed herself from the grisly vault. Dressed only in her flimsy shroud, she staggered to her house and called out to her husband. He opened a window and thought he was seeing a ghost. Terrified, he shouted that he would buy more Masses for her soul and ordered the servants to bolt the shutters.
Ginevra crept to her parents’ home, where her mother sat weeping by the hearth. Certain that a phantom had appeared before them, her sorrowful parents bid the sad little wraith to rest in peace and locked the door.
Summoning what little strength was left in her wasted body, Ginevra dragged herself to the house of the young man she had loved and called his name. At the sound of her voice, Antonio rushed outside and carried her, almost frozen, to his bed. With his tireless care, Ginevra slowly regained her health.
When her husband learned of Ginevra’s return to life, he demanded restitution of his rightful “property.” Antonio, determined never to lose his beloved again, pleaded their case before an ecclesiastical court. Since death had ended her first marriage, the vicar ruled, Ginevra was free to marry the man she loved.
Like Dante, Ginevra lives on. According to local legend, on the first Tuesday of every month, her ghost, dressed in white, rises from her tomb. In the dark of night, she retraces her path as she wanders from the family crypt to her husband’s window and then to her parents’ door before finally reaching Antonio’s home.
There, once more, she finds comfort in her beloved’s arms—providing romantics with the happy ending we crave and proving for all time that the passion of true love can triumph over church, state, narrow minds, and stone cold hearts.