Casanova's Fifty: The Mythology of Oysters and Desire

Giacomo Casanova wrote his memoirs, Histoire de ma vie, as the librarian of Dux Castle in Bohemia in the last decade of his life. They contain his best-known oyster scene, and it happens in Rome, not Venice, in the winter of 1771. Casanova takes two young women boarding at a Roman convent, Armellina and Emilia, to supper at an inn. The waiter asks whether he wants oysters. The women have never seen one. The oysters, the waiter says, come from the arsenal at Venice and cost fifty paoli the hundred; Casanova orders them and has them opened at the table. Armellina, alarmed that her curiosity is costing him five Roman scudi, begs him to cancel.¹ He does not. He teaches Emilia to pass an oyster from her lips to his in its shell. Armellina copies her, and with glasses of punch between rounds they keep going until the last oyster is gone.

In the next chapter, at a later supper, an oyster he is offering Emilia slips from the shell and falls into her bodice. She tries to retrieve it; he claims it "by right", has her unlace, and recovers it with his lips.² Casanova wrote the scene with care, and he gave the oyster a job. It moves the evening forward, one shell at a time.

The Fifty That Isn't There

Popular accounts of Casanova's appetite almost always repeat that he ate fifty oysters every morning. We could not find it in the memoirs. The oyster episodes in the manuscript are suppers, and the only number they give is a hundred oysters ordered for a table of three. The breakfast figure looks like a later embroidery. That suits him: the memoirs are already an exercise in self-mythologizing, and the legend just kept going. What survives the check is the part the legend was about anyway. For Casanova, oysters belonged to seduction more than any other food.

The Aphrodisiac Question

The oldest layer of the story is linguistic. "Aphrodisiac" comes from Aphrodite. In Hesiod's Theogony she is born from sea foam, the foam around the severed genitals of Ouranos, and drifts ashore at Cythera and Cyprus.³ A food eaten raw and alive, tasting of the sea, was always going to be pulled into her orbit. The reputation is far older than any chemistry, and it has never needed any.

The chemistry, when it arrived, was thinner than the headlines. In March 2005 George Fisher, a chemist at Barry University in Miami, working with Italian chemists, reported at the American Chemical Society's national meeting in San Diego that bivalves contain D-aspartic acid and N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA). In lab rats, those amino acids had triggered the release of sex hormones such as testosterone and estrogen.⁴ The headlines missed a detail: the study had found the amino acid in mussels and did not involve oysters at all.⁵ Whether dietary D-aspartic acid does anything comparable in people is still unsettled: a 2017 systematic review found consistent testosterone effects in animal studies but inconsistent results across the four human trials, which were small and short.⁶

The zinc argument is sturdier on the nutrition side. The body needs zinc to make testosterone. In one study of healthy men, cutting dietary zinc lowered serum testosterone, and supplementing older men who were marginally deficient raised it.⁷ Oysters are the richest common source of zinc in any diet. USDA data put raw wild Eastern oysters at 39.3 mg of zinc per 100 g and raw Pacific oysters at 16.6 mg,⁸ against an adult daily requirement of 8–11 mg.⁹ Fixing a deficiency is a long way from creating desire, though, and no study has shown oysters doing the second.

Rome and the First Oyster Culture

The Romans ate oysters in quantity, and they also invented oyster farming. Pliny the Elder records that Sergius Orata built the first oyster beds at Baiae on the Bay of Naples "in the age of the orator Lucius Crassus, before the Marsic War", which puts it before 91 BCE. Pliny is explicit about the motive: Orata did it "not for gluttony but for greed", and made large revenues from it. He was also the first, Pliny says, to award the prize for flavor to oysters from the Lucrine Lake.¹⁰

Baiae was the luxury resort of the late Republic, and Orata was selling to it. Anyone who follows modern oyster finishing will stop at Pliny's next sentences. When the market later decided that oysters from Brundisium, at the far end of Italy, were worth fetching, someone devised a way to settle the argument between the two flavors: the Brundisium oysters were laid in the Lucrine to feed back up after their long journey.¹⁰ Relaying a transported oyster in a second water to reshape its condition and taste is exactly what a French claire does today.

Pliny also notes that when Orata was making the Lucrine famous, "the shores of Britain were not yet serving" Rome. A century later they were. Juvenal's fourth satire mocks a glutton who could tell at first bite whether an oyster came from Circeii, from the Lucrine rocks, or from the beds at Rutupiae, which is Richborough in Kent.¹¹ The joke only works if British oysters were a recognized luxury on Roman tables.

The Oyster at the Table of Power

Serving fresh seafood in quantity, far from the coast, has always been a show of reach: proof that you can make the perishable arrive on time. One well-documented case involves the whole category rather than oysters alone. In April 1671, the Prince de Condé entertained Louis XIV at Chantilly. His maître d'hôtel, François Vatel, rose before dawn to find that only a fraction of the marée, the fresh fish and shellfish ordered for the Friday meal, had arrived. Believing the rest would not come, he ran himself through with his sword. The carts began arriving shortly afterward. Madame de Sévigné told the story in a letter, and it has been retold ever since.¹²

Casanova spoke this language fluently. His memoir is a record of getting in: to drawing rooms, bedrooms and dinner tables that were normally closed to the son of Venetian actors. The Roman supper is a small example. He sends for the sea of his own city, pays a price that frightens his guests, and turns the whole thing into theater.

The Mythology's Use

The oyster-as-aphrodisiac story survives on menus and in every February lifestyle feature because it is useful, whatever the biochemistry says. It gives permission. Eating an oyster becomes an act of pleasure rather than nutrition, and the person ordering tonight gets to feel related to Casanova at his Roman inn and to the villas above the Lucrine Lake.

Luxury food works like that. It seats you in a long line of people who knew how to live. The checked version of the story loses the fifty-oyster breakfast and the tidy chemistry. In exchange it gives you a Roman who farmed oysters for money, a satirist who could name their shore by taste, and a memoirist who ordered a hundred and made them the whole evening.

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