A closer look
Casanova is famous for his bedroom escapades, but his actual magnum opus was breaking out of Venice's elite Piombi prison. Locked directly under the Doge's Palace roof in unbearable heat, he didn't just pick a lock. He engineered an insanely complex plot involving a smuggled iron spike, a hollowed-out Bible, and digging through the ceiling, only to climb over the treacherous lead roof in the dead of night. He then walked down the palace's grand staircase and took a gondola to freedom like an 18th-century James Bond.
