29 August – 2 November 2025 Venice, Museo di Palazzo Mocenigo Curated by Gianni De Luigi Monica Viero Luigi Zanini
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Aldo Ravà, admirer of the 18th century The Venetian collector Aldo Ravà (Venice, 1 April 1879 – 31 January 1923) was an art and literature scholar, a profound connoisseur of the 18th century and author of over sixty publications on this century. He had an almost symbiotic relationship with 18th-century Venice, publishing many studies on its leading figures, including Carlo Goldoni, Giovanni Battista Piazzetta, Pietro Longhi, Marco Pitteri, and of course, Giacomo Casanova.
Ravà was among the first to rehabilitate Casanova as an
acute interpreter of his time and to recast him as something other than the
unscrupulous libertine stereotype. Aldo
Ravà on Casanova’s trail Ravà’s interest in Casanova began in 1910 after a long
stay in Duchcov, a small town in Bohemia where Casanova spent his final years
working as a librarian at Waldstein Castle. Ravà dedicated over twenty studies
to Casanova.
In Venice Ravà began
to organise the collected material, publishing an initial account on 18
September 1910 in the article entitled ‘Studi casanoviani a Dux’, published in
Il Marzocco. In this article, he describes the castle at Duchcov, and the
library in particular: “This is a vast, vaulted room, wholly whitewashed and
illuminated by numerous large, windows. The white shelves and benches are
filled with 24,000 volumes, including many incunabula and precious manuscripts.
I have observed that the books have been chosen with
wide-ranging and discerning eclecticism: there are Greek and Latin classics,
works on medicine, natural history, law, philosophy and mathematics, beautiful
French editions from the 18th century illustrated by renowned engravers, and
numerous theatre collections.
Casanova was in charge of this library […]” Ravà continues
by describing the search for further documents preserved in the castle: “I
therefore asked Schloss Verwalter if there was not another room in the immense
castle where books or manuscripts were kept; he then took me to a small room on
the ground floor […], where I saw cupboards full of papers belonging to the
Waldstein family, which I examined without finding anything interesting, and
shelves containing three or four hundred volumes, which, after a quick
examination, I was convinced must have been Casanova’s personal library.” …….
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