Benedetto Casanova: The Memoirs

By Marten Weber

No doubt you have heard of Casanova, the famous seducer of countless women, and maybe you’ve seen the movie, or read the account of his life. But did you know he may have had a gay brother?

Benedetto, a few years Giacomo’s junior, was pressed into service of the Church, to follow the famous lover of women through the courts of Europe. On the way he had amorous adventures with countless men, but, unlike his brother, fell in love and kept alive a romantic relationship with a strapping German soldier over time and distance.

Benedetto Casanova’s (fictional) memoirs were discovered only in 1881, when an English traveler rummaging through a private library in Rome found them glued to the pages of a book. They were written in Italian and have never before been published in English.

Marten Weber delivers a wonderful 'translation' of this challenging text, full of linguistic cunning and his usual talent for breathtaking eroticism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Marten Weber
• Release date: Mar 29, 2011
• ISBN: 9783950305838

Marten Weber

I am of mixed parentage (a man and a woman) and have lived in more countries than I can count on hands and feet together. I speak several languages, and believe in multiculturalism, tolerance, and free champagne also in economy class. I dislike bigots and fanatics of all denominations. I am hugely uncomfortable with labels, even seemingly benign ones such as 'gay,' 'straight,' or 'sugar-free' and prefer instead to judge people by their sense of humor and shoe size. I believe that everybody, regardless of race or gender, income or size of genitals, should be gay for a year. Over the past two decades, I have published hundreds of stories and novellas and set them free on the Internet, not always under my real name. Some of them have mated with other texts, music and videos, to produce the most curious offspring. One story has left the known universe and is currently a best-seller on Pharus II. Most of my recent books concern the lives and adventures of men, both today, in history, and in the future.

Book preview

The Complete and Uncensored

Memoirs of

Benedetto Casanova

in a new English translation

by Marten Weber

Includes the only extant letter

to the actor Gianni Garini

With a foreword by Professor Guido Grancuore

Università di Ca’ Cornaro-Piscopia, Padua

© Copyright 2011 by Marten Weber

All rights reserved.

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Aquarius Publishing

London · Los Angeles · Taipei · Vienna

ISBN 978-3-9503058-3-8

Table of Contents

Introduction to the Memoirs

Note by the Translator

Benedetto’s Letter to Gianni Garini

CHAPTERS I and II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

Acknowledgments

Introduction to the Memoirs

Although recent scholarship has proved beyond any doubt the authenticity of the Benedetto Casanova memoirs, they have nonetheless remained a rather obscure and often willfully ignored piece of personal historical literature, and will very likely forever remain in the shadow of his older brother Jacques Casanova de Seingalt’s autobiography. The reasons for this shall be made evident in this brief introduction.

The original manuscript was discovered by accident in 1881, tumbling from an old bookshelf in the villa of a certain Roberto Avia on the outskirts of Rome. Apparently, Avia had received a visit by an acquaintance from England, of whom only the name ‘Oscar’ survives in a diary. Rummaging through the old library, Oscar fell from a ladder, seizing in the process the drapes which caught the spine of the aforementioned volume. The fact that it was a Voltaire in which the manuscript was hidden is not of inconsiderable irony, as the reader will discover in the course of perusing this tome.

For all we know, the manuscript has never been printed or published, yet we find in 19th century literature quite a few allusions to the work and the person of Benedetto Casanova. Since no other version is extant, we may conclude that the sole route of transmission led through this very manuscript, glued to the pages in the volume of Voltaire, to disguise its true nature maybe, or, more likely, because the younger Casanova was simply unable or unwilling to find a publisher for his unusual and unorthodox, not to mention highly erotic account.

We know from the citations and references to certain events in Benedetto’s life that his memoirs were read by others, in particular the Roman poet Santorelli, who referred to Benedetto as his ‘eternally simpering little muse, sat by the harpsichord, playing his Bach, remembering Parisian evenings.’ Santorelli, born in 1813, is unlikely to have met the real Benedetto, so the only way he could have known about the harpsichord, Bach, and Paris, was by reading the manuscript. The often voiced assertion that he may have gathered such details from oral account is hard to disprove, yet he often quotes passages of the memoirs, if not verbatim, then close enough to warrant the conclusion that he has indeed seen the original text.

We have a few more data points pertinent to the history of the manuscript. A contemporary of Benedetto by the name of Carlo Luigi Bottazzi refers in his diary to ‘another delightful evening at B’s with a reading from his stories, in which I take a vicarious pleasure.’ Bottazzi was in his twenties when Benedetto and his German lover retired in Rome. Clearly, the two erstwhile travelers often invited young men to their house, and Benedetto must have read excerpts of his memoirs to them, perhaps right after they were written around 1770-71. We know the time of writing because Benedetto mentions both the assassination of Johann Joachim Winckelmann in Trieste as having occurred ‘two years ago’ and the suicide of the French composer Guillemain as of ‘last year.’ The art historian’s brutal death occurred in 1768 and is also mentioned in Giacomo Casanova’s memoirs; Guillemain committed suicide in 1770.

So, the question begs asking, what happened to the memoirs after they were written? Were they copied at all? Why, if Benedetto was prepared to share his work within a circle of young men in Rome, did he not have it typeset and printed for wider distribution? To answer these questions, it is necessary to bear in mind the content of the manuscripts. These are not mere travel reports and adventure stories, or diaries concerned with the indiscretions of the rich and famous, which even Casanova the elder did not commit to paper until the very end, when he was safely out of reach of the authorities. They contain much bolder accounts and statements, whose very nature, had they become public, would have landed the author and presumably his publisher in jail or committed to an even worse fate. Two of the most egregious facts are that the younger Casanova preferred men, and that he was a proud atheist—either one would have meant the end of his scholarly career, his freedom, or his time on earth, in particular if we consider that the book was written in Rome and right under the nose of the Pope, a great ecclesiastical and temporal power of the age. If not his predilection for his own sex, his outspoken atheism surely would have landed him in enough trouble. How could the adventures of a gay Italian student of philosophy, who had no qualms about confessing that he thought all religion to be superstitious nonsense, have possibly been published? It is unthinkable. Sharing his reminiscences with a circle of friends already shows a great deal of courage and healthy disrespect for the authorities of the time, foremost of all the Holy Father at his doorstep.

The memoirs of his older brother Giacomo, as we will learn to address him throughout this volume, are of course familiar to many of the more adventurous and daring readers. Apart from their entertainment value, his Histoire de ma vie has deservedly attracted a fair amount of serious scholarship as a source of information about court etiquette and the life of nobility in the 18th century. As such, we may use the elder brother’s work to compare the two men to each other, and discover through their many dissimilarities (and few similarities) what it is exactly that Benedetto Casanova has left us, and why his recollections have remained hidden for so long.

We know a great deal about Giacomo Casanova from his own hand, in the descriptions of his childhood contained in the memoirs. On the other hand, we know very little about Benedetto’s origins. The first two chapters of the memoirs have not survived the sands of time, so we can only guess at the circumstances of his birth. There is no evidence in any church or hospital, and the records of his Alma Mater in Bologna would have been destroyed, if they still existed at that time, in the great fires of 1902. When he relates the events of 1760, Benedetto says of himself that in that year he was ‘twenty-seven or twenty-eight, I don’t know the exact year of my birth.’ He may well have been a year older. From the first chapter of Giacomo’s Ma Vie we know that their common mother was in 1730 ‘delivered of my brother Jean, who became Director of the Academy of painting at Dresden, and died there in 1795; and during the three following years she became the mother of two daughters, one of whom died at an early age.’ In the circumstances of the time, the death of a child would not have been exceptional or particularly noteworthy, but neither was the fact that many children were given away yet recorded as stillborn—this is quite a plausible explanation of what happened. There is mention in the Benedetto text of him being abandoned by his parents and raised by a man he refers to as his uncle, but who was not a true relative, and in Chapter III he says that because of his brother Giacomo’s notoriety, ‘nobody would pay much attention to me; not that anyone knew I existed, my mother had made sure of that.’ How she made sure of it remains unknown, but it is not unthinkable that she told the family she had been delivered of a dead girl, rather than confessing that a boy had been put up for adoption. If we believe this to be true, and there is no reason not to, then Benedetto could have been born either in late 1731, during the year 1732 or possibly in 1733.

Giacomo and Benedetto: two men on the eve of the Enlightenment—the philosophical movement which ultimately led to great social changes and the establishment of the United States, the first nation guided by principles of reason, or ‘common sense,’ rather than absolutist values. Both lived in Paris in the years before Rousseau wrote his Social Contract (1762), and Benedetto started his memoirs just when in Austria—which he still knew as a police state where the Church had undue influence—Joseph II came to power and instituted the most far-reaching reforms of any ruler in Europe.

At first glance, the two brothers could not have been more different. Whereas Giacomo claims that he ‘never had any fixed aim before [his] eyes, and that [his] system, if it can be called a system, has been to glide away unconcernedly on the stream of life, trusting to the wind wherever it led,’ Benedetto talks of feeling ‘a great need for order in [his] life from an early age on, a desire almost to follow orders and through these make sense of the world around [him].’ Maybe it was this desire to comply, to fit in, which the anonymous cardinal exploited when he sent Benedetto off on his journey. Giacomo produced offspring, and took women ‘in marriage’ for up to a year, but he does not fail to convince us throughout that he is not the marrying kind. Benedetto, who by popular belief should have been the more promiscuous of the two, fell in love almost immediately after leaving his homeland, and managed to keep that flame alight over almost a decade of separation, several thousand miles of travel, and the carnal knowledge of not a small number of men.

The two brothers’ temperaments too were very different. The old Giacomo Casanova looks back on his life and discovers a number of stages in his development. He had gone ‘in turn through every temperament; phlegmatic in my infancy; sanguine in my youth; later on, bilious; and now I have a disposition which engenders melancholy, and most likely will never change.’

Benedetto was a much calmer person, prone to long spells of depression from an early age, and never quite the animated, boisterous character his older sibling was. He admits that his entire life he was beset by ‘a strange melancholy and sadness [he could] never quite shake off, and which seem[ed] to permeate every fiber of [his] being.’ Some scholars have read evidence of a medical condition into Benedetto’s long and frequent spells of melancholy, although the point is contentious. At best, he was a thoughtful and courageous intellectual, overwhelmed by the impossibility of living freely in this world as an atheist, and as a homosexual. He suffered too because for many years, and despite his many sexual partners, he was very lonely—a testimony to his great love for one man who fought a cruel war whilst Benedetto waited for him in Paris. The fate of the less fortunate, from gay men executed for their love, to the persecuted English and the murder of a German art historian presumably for similar motives, may have aggravated his depression.

Despite being a womanizer and living, for all intents and purposes, quite contrary to what society believed to be its current norm, Giacomo Casanova rarely showed the wit and perspicacity, or even the inclination of a revolutionary. He violated those norms without remorse or guilt and never once intellectually questioned them. On the contrary, they were the very framework, the corset, if you allow the pun, from which he derived his true pleasure in life.

Quite the opposite, his gay brother Benedetto did nothing but put into question the morality of his fellow men and women. He berated them, cursed them, at the same time sheltering under his libertine wings those who, like him, could and would not fit in.

With all those differences in character accounted for, what amazes most is that in the course of all their years chasing across Europe, and despite all the obvious divergences in temperament, morality, faith and most strikingly, sexual predilection, towards the end of the journey, Benedetto comes to recognize a strange kinship after Giacomo attacks the philosopher Voltaire for trying to change human nature. Humbled by the experience, he writes:

…I was quite rattled by the words I had heard issue from Casanova’s mouth, for in a way, there was more erudition in those simple pronouncements than in all of Voltaire’s writings. To accept man as he is, and not proscribe, ordain, form by force or call of reason, that was just what I envisaged. Were my brother and I so alike? What else did we, both, in our lives, but give in to our instincts, let them roam, concern ourselves not with what may be, or what might have been, and not what should be, by some self-imposed moral authority, but simply take delight in what is? To see and behold, and marvel and love, and not pester our fellow men incessantly for their shortcomings. Once more then I recognized that sense of kinship with my sibling, felt him, the seducer and corrupter of countless women, closer to my heart and way of thinking than the greatest living philosopher on earth.

That Giacomo’s memoirs were written at the end of his life is beyond doubt, yet he furnishes the reader with so much detail, in particular about his sexual conquests, that many of the escapades seem like inventions of an aged mind trying to recapture his lost youth rather than truthful accounts. Who of us can look back on last year and remember every word spoken, not to mention half a century ago? Benedetto too at times seems to recall not events a decade past, but the passion of last night, yet his recollections appear a lot more truthful. Throughout the book, the author does not hide the fact that certain things have escaped his memory. When he does not recall an event exactly, he gives a cursory remark only. There are a number of instances where he recaptures an entire dialog, but these are so rare and remarkable, and often so emotional, that it is entirely believable they could have stayed so fresh in his memory for a long time; the same cannot be said for the hundreds of conversations—mostly between lovers—contained in Giacomo’s account.

Which brings us to the biggest and most obvious difference between the siblings. Whereas the older brother professes a love for women bordering on the obsessive (‘I felt myself born for the fair sex’), Benedetto was clearly drawn towards men from an early age, and showed very little shame or hesitation in pursuing his affairs or talking about them, at a time when the word gay had quite another meaning, and ideas such as gay marriage, gay rights, or even a gay lifestyle and self-confessed homosexuality were non-existent, or at best hidden behind so many impenetrable veils.

Not only was he homosexual, he was a proud gay man, at the beginning even a proud—although he would have objected to that epithet—passive gay man! He understood that he was different, and that being so did not subtract from his humanity or worth. On the contrary, he was convinced that love for men did make him a better thinker, maybe even a better human being. If that reeks of the gay chauvinism that often permeates the political discourse of our own time, it may serve as a stark and startling reminder and call to reason.

In all these aspects, plus the rights and protection of vulnerable elements of society, in particular women, Benedetto Casanova was a trailblazer, an innovator. Although the Enlightenment itself took another fifty years to gain a true foothold in Europe, Benedetto Casanova must be regarded as enlightened long before the basic tenets of the movement were even put into writing, before a Voltaire was widely read, a Kant understood, and a Benjamin Franklin returned home to put his mark on the—back then, and only for a short time—freest and most liberal of nations.

Finally, that the account of his peregrinations, his numerous adventures with men, and his philosophy of freedom can now be published at last, in a climate of comparative tolerance at least in the Western world, is truly astonishing. For one, it is amazing how free our society has become in its acceptance of alternative lifestyles. Young gay lovers sit in my classroom today holding hands, and kissing each other in the aisles during the breaks. Only a few years ago, such scenes were unthinkable in conservative, Catholic Italy!

On the other hand, it is also quite remarkable how long it has taken for the world to accept the fact that two men, or two women, can be as in love with each other as two persons of the opposite sex. This fact will astonish you even more after reading Benedetto’s account, which dates from a time when gay men were regularly imprisoned, tortured, or killed for their ‘crimes against nature.’ Not even the enlightened Voltaire managed to come to terms with it, as we shall see. Gays are still treated in the most abominable manner in conservative societies of today—and you do not have to look as far as Iran or the Arab world for corroboration. Even in the West there exist pockets of irrational, allegedly god-fearing, but utterly despicable self-righteousness that demand or condone the ostracizing, imprisoning, torturing and killing of men and women for their sexual orientation.

In many ways, Benedetto’s memoirs serve to remind us that not all is well in our world, and that as a global society, we still have a long way to go. In the penultimate chapter, when he speaks of his dream that one day children in schools around the world will learn about ‘the true power of the mind’ and ‘the true qualities of the human heart,’ rather than absorb dead knowledge and superstitions, Benedetto Casanova, traveler and philosopher, lover of men and libertine, becomes a visionary, whose prophesies, alas, have not yet come to pass, and whose beautiful, prescient dreams still remain far from being reality.

Guido Grancuore

Università di Ca’ Cornaro-Piscopia

June 2009

Note by the Translator

This is not the first translation of the Benedetto Casanova memoirs, but it is the first complete attempt, in the sense that it encompasses all the material of the extant manuscript.

Quite fortunately, apart from the missing two chapters at the beginning of the text, few other pages are lost to us. The positions of these have been clearly marked. Where however the manuscript contains an undecipherable word, or blot of ink, has been torn or in other ways rendered illegible, an educated guess has been made as to the correct meaning, and the text completed in accordance with the surrounding passage. In the interest of fluency, with a few exceptions only, such instances have not been specifically marked in this edition. I am indebted to Professor Grancuore, Maximilian Hofmayr, Dr. Jonathan Wise and others for their generous assistance in this task.

If the language of my translation varies between a somewhat more archaic and a more contemporary style, this is primarily because I have tried to give credit to the first translator of the work, Sir Geoffrey Balsteep, who in 1886, five years after the Italian manuscript had been discovered, attempted a first rendering for an English public. Where the result of this combined effort is wanting in elegance, this is alone my fault.

However earnestly Balsteep applied himself to the task, he had chosen a text whose publication would have been impossible in the climate of the time. He personally felt that he did not have the constitution or the ability to complete the work. In 1887 he wrote to his friend Oscar Wilde:

God help me, I do not think I can accomplish what I have set out to do! The text includes so very many passages which are so direct and unrestrained, so openly descriptive of the love between men, that I find myself aroused, disturbed, unable to continue until my urges have been satisfied. That accomplished, I am overcome by the fear of discovery at every turn of the page. Benedetto has instilled in me a sense of guilt, and I fear I must leave the completion to a better man than me, and perhaps, a much later epoch than now.

Far be it for me to consider myself a ‘better man’ than Balsteep—the epoch, however, is certainly a different one. Never in the history of mankind, except perhaps ancient Greece, has homosexual love been spoken of so freely as now. Never before has it been possible to render in such clarity, and publish without the fear of retribution, such an openly sensual work.

The second reason why the style of my translation may vary between chapters is due to the constitution of the original itself. It has been suggested that the third and parts of the penultimate chapter in particular were each written immediately after the events, and precede the remainder of the memoirs. Such analysis is mostly based on differences in style and choice of words. One may also assume that the recollection of his time in French-speaking parts of the world may have invoked in the polyglot Benedetto the desire to emulate the more florid cadences of the French tongue spoken there, whereas his time in Bologna and Rome, surrounded often by soldiers and laborers, may have given rise to a desire to employ a simpler, more conventional form of expression. I have tried, however inexpertly, to give credit to both in my translation.

Because there has never been a proper editor to take a pen to Benedetto’s memoirs, the Italian original is full of errors and inconsistencies. Sometimes the writer gets so carried away with the recollection of his exploits that there are clear breaks in the timeline, confusion of names, of certain characteristics of personages etc. Where these were obvious, I have corrected them without giving the reader warning of any alterations, hopefully hiding them behind a veil of acceptable English prose.

Likewise, although writing in his native Italian, Benedetto often confuses words, makes use of convoluted and at times erroneous sentence structure, and mixes his Venetian Italian with the Bolognese, Roman or Tuscan variety, and even includes Latin, Greek, German and French words in his lexicon. I have left some of these instances untranslated, in particular where the emphasis given thereby adds to the character or expressiveness of the text.

I have tried to render some of the idiosyncrasies of Benedetto’s speech into English, where they may appear to the untrained eye as somewhat unusual. All the vulgarities in the text are entirely the author’s work and although an attempt has been made to give them a flavor of centuries past, I have also resorted to delivering them in a more modern style, which I hope may instill in the reader the same arduous passions which Benedetto seemed to have relished during the composition of the text.

Finally, Benedetto Casanova delights in the use of a bewildering array of foreign words to describe certain parts of the male anatomy, reaching in their provenance from the mountains of Sicily to the polders of the Low Countries, from the salons of Paris to the bathhouses of Vienna. In the interest of accessibility, I have replaced these sometimes antiquated and bizarre terms with a narrow selection of English expressions most likely familiar to the modern reader. Any anachronism in these and other instances are entirely my responsibility and must not reflect badly on the author.

Marten Weber

Siena, Paris and Boston

2007-11

Benedetto’s Letter to Gianni Garini

The Italian dancer, actor, musician and playwright Gianni Garini (1735-1789) was a lifelong friend and confidant of Benedetto Casanova. The two men met in Milan for a brief spell and spent two years living in close proximity to each other in Paris, where Garini was engaged at the Comedie Francaise. After Benedetto Casanova settled in Rome, Garini seems to have visited his friend quite often; letters between Garini and the English poet Thomas Gray, who stayed with Garini in Italy, show that this is so. There is however no evidence that Gray knew Benedetto Casanova or ever visited his home; Gray died in 1771, the approximate time the memoirs in this book were written.

The following letter was found in a trunk full of plays, sheet music, a pierrot costume, leather shoes and a curiously painted four-legged stool with a hole in it. The correspondence is undated, but it seems to have been written sometime between 1767 and 1770.

Carissimo!

It has been far too long! I love you and I miss you so my dear. I hear from C.A. who has seen you in Milan that you are doing well. Are you really writing your own plays now? I always thought you had talent! Will you write one about me, me, me? Please do, and in it make me very handsome and smart!

Meanwhile, in real life, age with all its horrors is upon me. I have now crow’s feet on my eyes and wrinkly skin on my bottom. I will never find it agreeable, being more of a woman than C.A. who is taking it in his stride. We have received new music from Paris, but nothing of interest was in the package. The new harpsichord cost a fortune, and the paint is chipping already. Nothing is of good quality anymore! I had shoes made by Pistarini, and the soles came off after only a month. Where will this end?

Rome is wet, and stinks worse every year. T. wants to move to Tuscany, but we cannot afford the prices there. Also, it is full of Englishmen, will they ever stop coming? These poor people! Simmons has sent me ‘Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous’ by a fellow named Berkeley, to translate he says, but I have read them briefly and they are horrid. To abuse the handsome Hylas for such chimeras!

I have learned from T. only last week that when I first returned to Bologna, Franz, the handsome Austrian, had been in jail! Allegedly for having been caught with a youth by the fountain, but I do not believe that—there was never anything going on by that fountain, nothing, I swear! I don’t understand why nobody told me then he was in jail, most especially the Cardinal! He could have said something! Or did he not know? You do remember Franz, do you not? Oh, what a man! What a sad life was his; I weep for him still.

G.’s son is growing up so fast. I watch him playing with his father in the garden often. He will be as strong as his babbo one day. Do you think I should tell him the little sketch I keep in my bedroom is a portrait of his father? The thought beguiles me. I am evil, I know. You know the sketch I mean, I showed it to you when you were here last.

We are going to Spain in July on a ‘secret mission.’ They still call it that but everybody knows who C.A. is working for and what he is doing there. The Jesuits, always the Jesuits. I promise I will go to Calle Leganitos to pay my respects. I still play you know, I have not given up. His, and Bach’s.

At least one of us is still working hard and making money. I on the other hand have done nothing but write. I can’t write, as you know, so it’s not a play or anything illustrious, just musings, translations, a few poems. I always feel inspired when the twins run round in their new undergarments. But I will write my memoirs one day, everything that has happened to me. You will be in it, darling! You and all the pretty men we met—weren’t there too many? To the uninitiated it will read like so much drivel, but I think it will be quite romantic. I can never publish it, I know that, they’d burn me at the stake. Do they still burn people for it? It’s such a dreadful world we live in. I hope my brother never writes his memoirs, and I doubt he will. He is worse than me with the pen, he can’t even spell. I think he is somewhere in Berlin or Prague. Getting on in years, but can you believe it, when we go out here, people still talk about him. What has he ever done that merits such notoriety, I want to know? What? Just a joke.

Give him a kiss, whoever it is sleeping by your side tonight. And if you are alone, here is an extra kiss from me. A sweet one. You know where it goes.

B.

P.S. Will you come for the Corso next year? You must! We miss you so!

——

The Complete and Uncensored

Memoirs of

Benedetto Casanova

——

CHAPTERS I and II

[The first two chapters of the memoirs are missing. We know by deductive process and from references in other chapters what they must have contained, namely an account of Benedetto’s youth and school years, and his military service. We do not know when and where exactly he was born, where he spent his early years, and which schools he went to. Based on contemporary sources, we can assume that like most Venetians he was at a church school in Padua from age eleven to sixteen, after which we meet him upon arrival in the university town of Bologna. There are probably two pages missing from the third chapter as well, which starts in the middle of a sentence.]

CHAPTER III

…and arrived in the early afternoon, more tired than the horses, but that is nothing remarkable for we treated them with compassion and Pietro hardly ever gives them the whip. This is something I have always abhorred, the bad treatment of animals, it is a disgrace!

We found the house almost immediately in the town center, but not located in a very nice street. In the narrow alley we encountered upon the pavement a large number of beggars, a man beset by St. Vitus’ dance, a wretched mother in rags, her child bundled in her arms, and a bilious old man with a wooden leg, which he used to gesticulate wildly. When we pulled in, they all rose with outstretched hands. I gave a few coins, but was relieved when we found the door quickly and the mob dispersed. To think that this is only four streets away from the Archbishop’s residence gives pause for thought. They roamed about a lot, these unfortunate, deracinated people: the one with the wooden leg I saw repeatedly all over town.

Pietro carried my bags, as he always did by then. I cannot remember when he started to behave like my servant, but I told him not to many times, as I have always considered him a friend more than a retainer, but then he was probably in heat again because of the motion of the carriage, and when he was in heat, and could do nothing about it, he tried to work it off by sweating and panting a lot. Unless I treated him as a servant, he just slept all day and could not even be made to fetch the simplest things. Yet when I let him feel the leash so to speak, he became very accommodating and even diligent in the execution of his duties. He was servile like an ox, but randy like a bull—one can have both it seems.

He moved all the boxes and trunks into the house, including the little table uncle had given me, although I really did not know what I was supposed to do with it. Pietro also brought in the gabinetto, which I would have left outside on the wagon, for I saw no use for it here. It did look too much like a painted toilet, come to think of it, and I did not know then if I would ever take it with me. It was such an awkward piece, and I feared people might ask questions.

The trunks with my clothes and books were only two, since I did not own much in those days; two suits and only one coat, and of my books I merely lugged about the ledgers of my last year in school, a few Latin and Greek texts, the small compendium, my dictionary, and not even the bible Father Antonio had given me, and which I left behind when we quitted Italy. Even so, Pietro complained a lot when he hauled them in and told me that I must get porters next time. I reminded him that I had offered to do so, but, what do you expect from a country bumpkin like him? Always the whining! First he wants to do everything himself, and then he complains about the heavy load. At least he did as he promised. Without him, I would have had additional expenses at every step, so I must be understanding and grateful. One must treat one’s servants with respect, Father Antonio always said, before kicking them in their behinds. Oh he was a repugnant man, and a mean man, and a bad teacher, and an even worse priest, the old fool, and I was glad I had seen the last of him!

Watching him standing there, sweat dripping from his every pore, I promised Pietro that as soon as we had been shown to our apartments I would see to it that his juices were returned to a more healthy balance. I was young then and could offer such gifts more freely. Nobody came to show us the rooms, as the landlady was out, but we found them alone easily enough, entering through the open door. Doors are always left open in Bologna, I do not know the reason for this strange tradition. Maybe it is because of the heat—the narrow streets can become like ovens in the summer, but then why is it not done everywhere in the South?

I still recall how grateful I felt upon my arrival at the house. It was Signora Bagatti who had arranged for me and Pietro to have the largest room to ourselves, just above the main kitchen. She is a kind woman, and I paid the landlady, her relative, extra for the big breakfast on Sundays, and to have the rooms swept twice a week, and before the feast days.

I was also very proud to finally have arrived at the Alma Mater Studiorum, which would now be my home for three years at least! All the wisdom of the world could be found there in Bologna, I thought back then. There are more professors, more philosophers, theologians, physicians and mathematicians; more books and more libraries here than in any other city of the world! How naïve I was! I truly bethought myself to have arrived at the center of the world, and it was only a day ride on the wagon, and it took only so long because they had stopped us for the customs inspection, which I thought then and still think is a preposterous affair, for if anyone wants to dupe the customs clerks or break the quarantine, he only has to wade up the river a bit, and come ashore there. Of course we could not do that with all the luggage we were carrying.

Yet I have to admit that I was looking forward as much to the men I would meet here as I did to the classes in philosophy and mathematics I intended to take. Intended, yes, but nothing became of my mathematical studies. The men of the Po valley are well known all over Europe as both hard-working, eager to please, and often strikingly handsome, but that may be the case for all Italians. Not the hard-working part though, for in the South I later encountered many a sluggard who would rather spend his day gazing into the sun and taking snuff or drinking heavy wine than do an honest day’s work. But the men up here are also willing to give in to their darker sides more easily, especially those who are married and have too many children, for their wives are never available to satisfy their needs. For a few coins, one can get a leg up with a laborer or a soldier easily, and it is said that even at court there are goings-on you would not believe.

Soldiers! The city was full of them! The Spaniards and Neapolitans in their colorful but torn and stained uniforms, loitering at every corner! They had helped to fight back the Austrians and Germans and were staying on, or on their way back south. The Papal guards, the regiments from Ferrara, the Parmese! Every army in Italy seemed to be in Bologna at one point, resting, recovering, and whoring! The prostitutes were doing a brisk trade and every shade and size of woman had come in from the countryside to service them, including gypsy women from the South.

Pietro carried all the luggage up to our new apartments. Though large, it was not quite the residence I had expected; indeed, it was quite a sight, this musty room, the walls around the window full of chinks: completely empty bar a rickety old bookcase, a table on trestles with two wretched chairs and one narrow wooden bed with a palliasse that looked like a donkey had been slaughtered on it. It was so dirty and filthy, I told Pietro to get rid of it at once. I was certainly not willing to sleep on that! There was a tiny window in a very deep alcove, so deep one could lie there like on a bed and yet look out onto the street through the panes of the latticed window. Horses were pawing everywhere on the cobblestone streets, and the stink of their manure filled the air. What a foul city it was back then, thankfully it has been cleaned up since, and they banned all the beasts that used to roam freely. The room too smelled badly, of oil and food, especially fish, and garlic; odors which drifted at all times of the day up from the kitchen below. It was very dark and the floorboards creaked at lot.

Naturally, my first thought now was towards my trusted companion. I fetched a beaker of water from the washroom without, and offered him some which he took and gulped down avariciously. Then I seized his crotch to see if he was still in need of relief, and to my great delight he was as hard as I expected. It is very difficult for Pietro to hide his erection. Truly! It is enormous! And of course, he only has his simple linen trousers, which are very baggy and resemble nothing more than dyed drawers, except for the morocco patches. He can hide his cock well enough when it is soft in the folds of the fabric, but not when it is as hard as now! I stroked it a bit through the cloth, but he soon had undone the knot of his cord and everything dropped to the floor. He said nothing, just closed his eyes, as he always does, and let me go about my business. He made love to my mouth for the better part of half an hour. I was of course used by then to his horse-cock and my mouth and arse were stretched enough to accommodate him, on which in fact, he commented with his usual stolidity, I remember, having evacuated his seed.

—Always a pleasure, Benedetto. But I am afraid you will soon forget me!

I swallowed and wiped my mouth, then looked at him as I rose to my feet.

—Why would I forget you, my trusted Pietro?

—Oh, come on, in this city? Did you see the guards by the main gate as we came in? The soldiers in the streets? You’ll be in heaven here, you won’t have need of me!

I put my hands upon his shoulders.

—I will always have need of you, dear Pietro. But I did notice the guards by the gate as we came in. The left one was the most handsome man I have ever seen!

—And you have not seen much of the world! Where have you been but in that nest, and now here, and on the road between. You have seen nothing yet! Maria says the men in Bologna are the best looking in all of Europe, and always in heat. And she has been…

—Your dear Maria, my dear Pietro, is an insatiable gutter-whore!

—Sir, she is my sister! I will not have you speak of her… And by the way so are you!

—I am your sister?

—No. Insatiable, that is what you are!

He looked at me sheepishly. His mast, still dripping, grew quickly hard again. If it is really blood that fills it, as they say, and not the humors of love, I wonder how such a little fellow can have so much blood left to engorge such a large cock.

—Now, said he. Shall I fuck you before we look for the refectory?

There was no reason to object to that offer. As the reader has already had ample opportunity to learn, I was by then an unrepentant busone, a bottom and eager pleaser of men, always hungry for more. I am not ashamed to say so now as I look back on my many adventures, but I think even at the time I was already resigned to my fate. I might have been more reserved, shier maybe, especially with strangers. I did not know yet how to approach and seduce men, but between men such things are much easier accomplished than with women, who have to be flattered and lied to for hours before they will offer even the most fleeting of glances at their bosom.

Pietro simply waited for me to enter a state of complete undress and get down on all fours, having spread my cape and shirt over the dirty wooden floor. Within moments and with a little spittle, he had inserted his horse-cock to the hilt and was pumping away like a lunatic. When he took me thus from behind, I always bethought myself of a baker kneading his dough and beating it, I do not know why that image was always with me, I do not even like bread that much. It may have had something to do with the baker in our street, but I will come to that later. And, as always when Pietro took me, I started to shudder halfway through, and then passed out for a moment.

The reader will have observed that the passing out during the worship of my rear temple has so far only occurred with Pietro and the farmer I mentioned earlier, when I was still a child of mere fourteen. I have since come to the conclusion that a certain size prick is necessary to achieve that effect. Such a cock touches inside me a point of bliss, of utmost stimulation and rapture, which, if rubbed long and hard enough, duly causes me to lose my senses as a woman in a too-tight corset. I do not know why this happens, and unfortunately I have never known a physician intimately enough to inquire about such matters. I doubt in any case that any physician would be able to explain, for they are all quacks. But throughout my life, I have often fainted in the arms of very large lovers, and, to be frank, grown quite addicted to the sensation. It is the only complaint against the one who loves me now and forever, that he seldom produces such rapture in me, but it is of no importance, because true love makes all these carnal levities seem immaterial.

So, that was my first fuck in the new city of Bologna, not with a shiny handsome Papal guardsman as I had planned, but with my old and trusted friend and servant Pietro from Regazzoni; little rustic Pietro with the fat horse-cock. In my whole life, I have only ever met one prick larger than his, and that was in Paris, but belonged to an Italian too. I think our men are particularly blessed in that department, even though I cannot count myself amongst their numbers. Pietro came inside me as he always did, and I had great difficulty keeping his seed in during the ceremonial dinner an hour later—but I tried to, for it is good exercise to tighten the sphincter. This was by the way the dinner where I first saw the Cardinal, who shall remain unnamed even though he has already departed this earth. I did not know him, and was only a student without proper introductions. He did not see me then, but when I left, I noticed his black carriage, and the two drivers, very mysteriously huddled together under a thick black cloak.

My house in Bologna was only two removed from the home of Maria Gaetana Agnesi, where she nursed her father Pietro the mathematician upon his illness a few years later. I never met the woman, but I have heard great things of her, there and in Milan. One of her most famous books was published in the year I arrived in Bologna; I bought it in Rome recently, but it is too difficult for me to understand, as I am a right dimwit when it comes to numbers. I keep it only to show it to guests. She would have been a scientific mind of the first order, competing with all the German greats, if she had not wasted the rest of her days on theology. I think the death of her father pained her greatly, and she sought refuge in the teaching of the Church. In any case, she was a woman to prove that our belief in the inferiority of the female mind is nonsense. Every time I am confronted with that prejudice, I mention her name, but unfortunately not many have heard of her.

In between the two houses I remember a cloth-seller and a baker, the latter of which made the most mouth-watering panini I ever tasted. Having since lost my sweet tooth completely, I may be exaggerating, but revisiting that baker is high on my list of things to do should I ever have the opportunity to return to the city where it all started. There is another reason why I would like to see it again, for that baker had a young apprentice named Nico, who returned my affections quite freely after I bought bread from his master on a few occasions and slipped him a coin each time. It was not I who pursued him, it was he who followed me out the shop and up to my lodgings. The first time I noticed him he ran away when he encountered Pietro—many people were afraid of my servant because of his full beard and dark complexion, so the next time I sent him away before I went to buy my bread. Nico followed me again, and I stopped halfway up the flight of stairs; there I turned slowly. He did not move. We just looked at each other for a while. He had brown hair and wore it very short. He still had his baker’s apron on, all dusty with flour and pieces of dough sticking to it. He took one step towards me, and I waited. He smiled. I did not do a thing, really, because I fully expected him to ask me just for money, and I usually don’t pay in that manner, especially when I have not yet satisfied my urges. He spoke to me in a very low and remarkably deep voice for his age—I don’t remember what he said. He reached for his groin, but found it hidden under the apron, so he took that off and then gestured again. Still I made no move; I did not wink or ask him upstairs. He took another step, leaving the apron behind, and then another, so that only one step was between us.

We were still only looking and not touching, but I could see that there was desire in his eyes. He told me how beautiful I was, and that he had a cousin who was fair-haired, and with whom he did things. I asked him what things, and he reached out for my thighs and rubbed them a bit, immediately moving towards my tender portions, so I knew he was not a bottom. I took a step down, so that we now shared the same level and our bodies were pressed together face to face. He was breathing heavily, and to this day I remember how he smelled of flour and warm bread, causing in me both passions at the same time, hunger and concupiscence. He put his arms around me and kissed me so long I had to push him away to get some air. His mouth was big, and soft, and his tongue very gentle. He had not yet grown a beard. While we kissed, I felt his manhood rise and pressed against it. He was very much in love with me at that point and I could see I had to help him out quickly or he would need to change his trousers!

I led him up into my room. He undressed me and took me standing up, just like that, without any further affection. When he saw the window in the alcove, he pushed me towards it and told me to lie down on my stomach. This I did, so that my face was almost up against the grate and I could see down into the street. It had the curious effect of diverting my attention from the actions of his prick in my arse, and towards the comings and goings outside; I saw a cart full of apples pass, and thought of reaching down to steal one. He was also not very big in stature, and perhaps because Pietro had just taken me the day before, I was not very aroused by his love. But he did a good job the young lad, humping me like a dog—many young men have that tendency, and it takes a lot of time and effort to make them good lovers. I do not recall how we ended, but we did not linger or embrace much, because he had to get back to work. His business accomplished, he pulled up his trousers and left. We met three or four more times, but since it always had to be so quick and cold, I do not remember it with all too much fondness. I would have liked to kiss him more; he was a very good kisser, and very loving, but once he was inside me, his mind was on other things. I have made that observation several times in my life, that those who cannot gratify by size, make up for it by affection, in particular kissing. When I learned that lesson I became very apprehensive when a man kissed me for a long time, for it usually meant that disappointment was in store. Naturally this does not apply to all men, as the reader shall see in the pages to come.

Very soon after arriving in Bologna, maybe in the first week even, I made a call upon the Galvanis, and was duly seen by the master and his wife. My uncle had commended me to them. Their son Luigi was eleven then and already a very handsome boy, too serious though for my mind. The father tried to convince me that medicine was a far better pursuit than philosophy, but I replied that I had no inclinations to hie about and cut people’s veins open. Because he was a nice man, I did not want to offend him too much, I ostensibly promised to take his advice under consideration. He also suggested I learn music with Padre Martini, who was quite the most famous instructor at the time, but that too seemed to me an unworthy pursuit. Musicians are never well paid, and unless they enjoy good patronage, they can hardly make a living. He made me a gift of a little engraving by Reni—a frightful little picture of a wrinkled old man reclining. I have no idea why he thought this an appropriate present for one so young and handsome as me. Maybe as a memento mori. If anything, it put me off medicine for good.

In the early afternoon I visited some of the churches with them, and they gave me a grand tour of their city. They took me to see the residence of the Archbishop, where they told me that his predecessor, who had been very popular, was now Pope in Rome. This I had not known, but as this Pope had, indirectly, quite a strong influence on the course of my life, I mention him here. He was the only Pope who ever understood the necessity of economic reform in and beyond his dominions, but in the end he was bogged down with the Jesuits so much he did not implement any meaningful changes.

We strolled past the site where they are building the new theater, and they left me there I think. We exchanged a few commonplaces; I promised to visit again, but never did. Then I walked alone down Via Zamboni until I reached the Porta San Donato. This is not the same gate through which we had come in, but the reader will excuse my loss of direction in this new city. It is such a maze of houses, and they all looked alike—it took me months to find my way from my lodgings to the university without getting lost at least twice!

There was a group of soldiers standing at the gate in their colorful uniforms, passing a bottle of wine between them, until an officer appeared and to my great dismay they all dispersed. Two were left once the man on a caparisoned horse had passed, and I saw that they were the guards on duty and had been only distracted by the other fellows. Once disengaged and on their own, they took up their positions by the guardhouse again. One of them was quite drunk already, a sturdy fellow with very round and sloping shoulders. He wore a beard and had a carbuncle on his cheek. His chemise was loose enough for me not to see whether he was slim or fat. Although he could not have been older than twenty-three, his hair was already thinning. I took an immediate dislike to him. I thought it strange that they wore no helmets at all, at least a cap I would have expected, as almost everyone connected with the military in the