The Leads and Casanova's escape

Look south: the enclosed white stone bridge links the Doge's Palace, on your right, with the New Prisons, on your left. But the most feared jail was not across the canal; it was upstairs, under the roof of the palace itself. These were the Piombi, the Leads, cells beneath the lead sheets of the roof: freezing in winter and stifling in summer. At the lowest level were the Pozzi, the Wells.

1An awkward guest

On 26 July 1755, on the orders of the State Inquisitors, Giacomo Casanova was arrested: a thirty-year-old Venetian gambler, seducer and enthusiast of books on magic. There was no public trial. He was locked in the Leads without being told for how long.

2The night of 31 October 1756

Casanova spent months preparing his escape with a fellow prisoner, the friar Marino Balbi. They cut through the ceiling, climbed out onto the lead roof, got back into the palace through a dormer window and made their way down through halls and staircases. In the morning a guard, convinced they were visitors locked in by mistake, opened the door for them. They walked out by the main staircase and fled by gondola to the mainland.

The arrest is in the records; the details of the escape we know mostly from Casanova himself, who told the story in a book published in 1788.

And he told it again and again, in salons across Europe: it was his finest calling card.

3What to look for

• The small barred windows of the Bridge of Sighs.
• The palace roof, where the Leads were.
• The gondolas gliding along the rio, like the one the fugitives took.