Casanova's Escape

“Casanova’s Escape” by Escape Venice is a beautifully atmospheric, historically grounded 60-minute escape room that successfully trading cardboard props for the authentic feel of 18th-century Venice. Set inside the real period walls of Palazzo Soranzo in Campo San Polo, the game leans heavily into its location to deliver a tense, tactile window into the Venetian Republic’s dark past.

The narrative picks up in November 1756, immediately following Giacomo Casanova’s legendary real-life escape from the Doge’s Palace Piombi prison. Your team plays as members of Casanova’s secret Masonic lodge who have hidden him away in a secure room inside a local casìno (meeting house). However, with Inquisition spies swarming the canals, paranoia has set in, and Casanova has locked himself in, doubting everyone. Your goal is to decrypt his trail, gain his trust, and secure his ultimate passage out of Venice before the guards breach the building.

Rather than relying on modern, high-tech electronic triggers, “Casanova’s Escape” favors classic, mechanical, and observation-based logic puzzles.

Players spend their time combing through period-accurate maps, uncovering hidden symbols, forcing secret doors, and shifting manual gears. Expect to sift through forbidden books and coded manuscripts to track Casanova’s philosophical and architectural secrets.

The layout can feel frantic as many puzzles are visible at once. Like all good escape rooms however, not all can be solved at the same time which brings a linear progress to aspects of the game. A larger group can split up to tackle independent padlock chains, keys, and deciphering tasks simultaneously in part though, keeping it fun for all involved.

The absolute highlight of this room is its setting. Operating within an authentic Venetian palace means the smell of old, aged timber wood and the ancient stone walls provide an organic immersion that purpose-built commercial sets cannot replicate.

It is a challenging enough room to keep veterans engaged but accessible to beginners due to an attentive, narrative-driven hint system provided by the hosts. Clues and remaining time can be seen on the screen inside the room.

Highly recommended room for anyone but especially for small to medium groups (2 to 6 players) who value deep historical immersion, physical manipulation of clues, and traditional padlock puzzles over high-tech wizardry.