Who wants to champion the figure of Don Giovanni in the time of Harvey Weinstein and #MeToo? Don Giovanni is a rapist, murderer, serial seducer, and liar. Can he ever be held up as a role model or seen as a figure to be enjoyed? This is the task that the eminent Italian historian and lifelong feminist, Luisa Passerini, sets for herself in In Defense of Don Giovanni. As she developed the long arc of her distinguished career, Don Giovanni surprisingly became not only her role model but also a secret object of research.Taking her method from oral history, Passerini creates a series of characters with whom she discusses the forms and incarnations of the myth of Don Giovanni across time, from its first appearance in early medieval Spain and Commedia dell'Arte to its many European variations and its transposition to the colonial and postcolonial world in the Middle East, the Americas, and Africa. Pivoting round Don Giovanni's best known incarnation in Mozart's opera, Passerini and her interlocutors meet in different locations from Venice and Bern to Paris and Turin. They discuss plays, films, and operas and talk about art, novels, and psychoanalytic interpretations of the myth while also sharing their own life stories, in which Don Giovanni often plays a part that is, by turns, destructive, mischievous, and full of the joy of life.From his early beginnings in the Iberian Peninsula to recent analysis of the sexuality of |