Read Online Casanova's Women by Judith Summers - Free Book Online

indicating that in his parents’ home her grandson would be well-looked-after and properly fed. When Gozzi told Marcia that he had a younger sister who could help care for Giacomo, and that his father was a cobbler, the same trade as her own dear Girolamo had plied, Marcia agreed to pay the Gozzis double the boarding fees that her daughter had paid Signora Mida, and she immediately handed over a year’s money in advance.
    Marcia stayed on in Padua for another three days. She fed Giacomo all that he could eat, bathed him, and bought him a wig and new clothes. Only when she was satisfied that she had done everything she could for him did she return to Venice. Her heart was at peace. Her daughter had acted irresponsibly by abandoning Giacomo to an unspeakable monster, but she, his grandmother, was leaving him in trustworthy hands.
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    Unaware of the drama that was taking place nearer to home, Zanetta was still in Verona. Just over sixty miles west of Venice, the ancient city was a lively cultural centre dominated by its ancient Roman arena, a well-preserved oval amphitheatre surrounded by forty-five rows of marble steps capable of seating 25,000 spectators at their ease. For most of the year, this vast edifice was used for jousting, races and bull-baiting. During the summer months, however, a temporary wooden stage was erected in the centre of the arena, simple plank benches were constructed around it, and the best theatre companies in Italy took turns in displaying their talents there. That year it was the turn of the San Samuele actors to perform at this prestigious open-air venue, and the company’s highly talented actor/manager, Giuseppe Imer, was delighted to have Zanetta Casanova with him. With her ravishing looks and skilful acting she had become a favourite with his audiences whoflocked to see her play the romantic leads in the innovative musical interludes that he had introduced into his plays.
    There was a more personal reason, too, why the stout, charismatic and scrupulously polite Imer was glad that Zanetta had accompanied the players to Verona: he was in love with her. He had known her at least since her marriage, and neither maturity nor motherhood nor her recent sorrows had dimmed her attractions in his eyes. That summer, with his own wife Paolina and his daughters Teresa and Marianna far away in Venice, he was finally free to become her lover. Only months had passed since Zanetta had lost Gaetano, but no matter what her feelings were towards Imer it was almost taken for granted at the time that an actress should favour her impresario with her charms. Zanetta dutifully played the part of mistress, though with little enthusiasm.
    Their affair was closely observed by a young stage-struck lawyer who would one day become Italy’s most revered playwright. Born in Venice six months before Zanetta, although in more prosperous and enlightened circumstances, Carlo Goldoni had been obsessed with the theatre ever since he was a child; in contrast to the Farussis who had forbidden their daughter to have anything to do with it, his father had encouraged his son’s interest by building a puppet theatre for him and asking his own friends to write plays for it. After dropping out of medical school, Goldoni had qualified as a lawyer, but his heart had not been in the work, for he lived only to write. Success did not come immediately to him: his first carefully-composed lyrical tragedy,
Amalasunta
, had been derided by a group of actors in Milan; and in despair Goldoni had set fire to the manuscript that he had formerly regarded as his ‘treasure’. Soon afterwards Casali, a leading romantic actor at Venice’s San Samuele, had asked Goldoni to write a drama on the subject of the sixth-century Byzantine count, Belisarius. The play was to change both Goldoni’s life and the future of Imer’s theatre company.
    During the summer of 1734, Goldoni was passing through Verona with his new