He was the ultimate rake, the personification of the art of seduction. Now a museum is to be dedicated to the life of Casanova.

The “Casanova Museum and Experience”, which is billed as the first of its kind in the world, will open next month in his hometown of Venice.

The museum will recount not only his louche sexual conquests, which numbered around 120 if Casanova’s claims are to be believed, but his encounters with some of the best-known figures of his time, from Mozart and Voltaire to Benjamin Franklin and Madame de Pompadour, mistress to King Louis XV of France.

The opening of the museum on April 2, in Venice’s Palazzo Pesaro Papafava, not far from the Grand Canal, comes 220 years after the libertine’s death in 1798.

There will be six rooms dedicated to the adventurer, who was also a soldier, spy, linguist, philosopher and poet.

It is Casanova’s sexual conquests which garner the most attention – but he was much more than an arch seducer.

“Casanova might be surprised by his reputation in the modern world because he was a fiercely proud intellectual and polymath,” said Ian Kelly, a British historian and the author of “Casanova – Actor, Lover, Priest, Spy”, an acclaimed biography.