Fellini's Casanova more basic urges. The film opens with a carnival in Venice as a prelude to a series of erotic encounters that follow Giacomo Casanova through the cities of 18th-century Europe. The organizers of the festival attempt to raise a gigantic bust from the water; this fails, which is taken as a bad omen. Casanova is then introduced, as he visits one of Venice's islands to copulate with a fake nun for the pleasure of a rich voyeur; Casanova succeeds in entertaining him, but is frustrated that the man finds no interest in his research into alchemy and his further scheming.
Giacomo Casanova the only relief left to me was not to think of the future." Overcoming his inertia, Casanova set upon another escape plan. He solicited the help of the prisoner in the adjacent cell, Father Balbi, a renegade priest. The spike, carried to the new cell inside the armchair, was passed to the priest in a folio Bible carried under a heaping plate of pasta by the hoodwinked jailer. The priest made a hole in his ceiling, climbed across and made a hole in the ceiling of Casanova's cell. To neutralize his new cellmate, who was a spy, Casanova played on