Tag Archive: 0Italy

There’s nothing better than finding a cheeky marginal doodle or two, and that’s what we found when we picked up an otherwise nondescript copy of Julius Stinde’s Buchholzens in Italien at a recent fair. First published anonymously in Berlin in 1883, Stinde’s satirical…

Although perhaps largely forgotten now, Giambattista Casti (1724–1803), Salieri’s favoured librettist in Vienna in the 1780s, was notorious in his day, with a reputation for syphilis—Pushkin later wrote of the ‘noseless Casti’ in his lyric ‘K vel’mozhe’ (‘To a Grandee’, 1830)—and ‘for writing witty, salacious satires, as a sort of obscene, Italian Voltaire.  Casanova had […]