2 - Calle de la Muneghe
Calle de la Muneghe 2993 - Casanova's Birthplace & Grandmother's House
From Fondamenta De Le Scuole, the site of the Teatro San Samuele:
Continue through the passageway under the school building.
Turn right on to Ramo del Teatro.
Follow it to the left down Calle del Stampador.
Turn right on to Calle Del Orbi - named after the Scuola degli Orbi (school for the blind), which stood here during Casanova's time.
At the very end of this road, turn right on Crosera.
Immediately take the first street on your right, Sotoportego Calle De E Muneghe.
The address, Calle de le Muneghe 2993, is where academics believe - with some certainty, following a 1999 study of the 1740 cadastrals by leading Swiss “Casanovist” Helmut Watzlawick - that Casanova’s grandmother, Marzia Farussi, lived following the death of her husband in the same premises, from “a broken heart" after his daughter became an actress.
It would therefore be likely that it was also here (and not, as previously claimed, on Calle de la Comedia), that Casanova was born on Easter Monday, 2nd April 1725.
The building belonged to the Procuratie di San Marco and housed six poor families for free, including the widowed Marzia together, it is believed, with her 17 year old daughter and new 27 year old son-in-law, who probably lived here during their first year of marriage in 1724 until they departed for theatre work in London during 1726, leaving the one year old Giacomo to be raised by his grandmother in this house.
“My mother left me in the care of hers, who had forgiven her when she learned that my father had promised never to force her to appear on the stage. This is a promise which all actors make to the daughters of bourgeois families whom they marry, and which they never keep because their wives never hold them to it.”
When his parents returned to Venice in 1728, the three year old Casanova was reunited with them at the new family house around the corner on Calle de la Comedia, where he was brought up until his father's premature death in 1733, when he was just eight years of age.
With his widowed mother pursuing an acting career abroad, he moved back in to the care of his grandmother on Calle de le Muneghe, together with his four younger brothers and sisters, before his mother sent him to boarding school in Padua, a year later in 1734, where he was to live with Doctor Gozzi, a 26 year old priest.
“I was kissed goodbye, ordered always to obey her, and left there. Thus my family rid of me.”
As a 17 year old, Casanova would later nurse his beloved grandmother in ill health until her death on 18th March 1743 in the same Calle de le Muneghe home in which her husband had died.
Walking down the street, you will find the pretty Corte De La Muneghe on the left, long presumed to be the home of Casanova's grandmother, at number 2979, until recent studies disproved that idea.
