Casanova

His name is synonymous with lover, and he certainly had an affection for the opposite sex. A couple of years ago the original manuscript of his memoirs sold for a record-breaking $9.6 million. A Venetian by birth, he has apparently become especially celebrated by the present-day French.

An article about the man, and the manuscript, is at Smithsonian.com. Grinwout's loves the Smithsonian!

Author Tony Perrottet writes:

Giacomo Girolamo Casanova lived from 1725 to 1798... He was a true Enlightenment polymath, whose many achievements would put the likes of Hugh Hefner to shame. He hobnobbed with Voltaire, Catherine the Great, Benjamin Franklin and probably Mozart; survived as a gambler, an astrologer and spy; translated The Iliad into his Venetian dialect; and wrote a science fiction novel, a proto-feminist pamphlet and a range of mathematical treatises... The memoir teems with fantastic characters and incidents... Apart from the more than 120 notorious love affairs with countesses, milkmaids and nuns, which take up about a third of the book, the memoir includes escapes, duels, swindles, stagecoach journeys, arrests and meetings with royals, gamblers and mountebanks.

Read Who Was Casanova? You owe it to your love life, as well as your sense of adventure.