| Summary: | Emblematic figure of Venice and of its magnificent complexity, Giacomo Casanova, for his flexible and chameleon-like nature, is often presented, in the twentieth-century narrative that is inspired by him, as the embodiment of a sort of “Carnival spirit”: a spirit that induces one to seize the moment, to pretend to be someone else, to change objective and semblance, while, however, under a cloak and a mask, a shadow of melancholy, a subtle tedium, an indelible – to put it with Horace – strenua inertia is hatched. The essay aims to illustrate the persistence of this sparkling or dramatic “Carnival core” in the interpretations of the character offered by Stefan Zweig’s Casanova and by the novels The Return of Casanova by Arthur Schnitzler and Casanova in Bolzano by Sándor Márai.
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