Once upon a time there was a wizard or, we’d better say, a quack. He said he was from the Oriente but he was a Sicilian. He transformed metals into gold. Was he an alchemist or a vulgar con man? He was simply a swashbuckler with little scruples and a lot of names. The Count of Cagliostro or Giuseppe Balsamo? San Leo fortress whispers his history, but it is a tale with two voices. You can listen either to history or legend and they are chained together in the death tomb where Cagliostro was buried alive by the Inquisition. Here, “in August 1795, Giuseppe Balsamo, called the Count of Cagliostro died at the age of 52. Baptised as a Christian but sadly famous as a heretic and pagan, after having suffered because of his unflinching sins for four years, four months and five days in prison, he died without showing any penance and without leaving anyone in sorrow, devoid of the Communion by the Church”. And so, with a gelid death certificate, ends the adventure of one of the most enigmatic and dark characters of the Light Century. It ends in the San Leo fortress in the Marche, the old Montefeltro, between Urbino and San Marino. A rock spot 30 KM away from the sea. <I won’t die>, he said, <I cannot die>, he repeated to the jailers while walled up alive in the “pozzetto” death cell: a stone tomb with a door connected with the outside by a little trap-door. How could Cagliostro, the man who gave the elixir of eternal youthfulness, die? In fear that, if not the demons, his followers could relieve him, Pio VI decided to transfer him from the cell of Castel Sant’Angelo to San Leo fortress, transformed into a prison by the Inquisition. Cagliostro was scarcely fed and tortured for four years but, as the ‘wizard’ didn’t die, he was – as we are told – strangled. Cagliostro the quack was frightening as he was friend of the evil spirits but also of the Revolution. Imprisoned in the Bastille in 1875, he not only managed to get out proving his innocence but he also foresaw the fall of the prison in 1789. He was prosecuted for the famous “necklace affair”, a scandal that ravaged the French monarchy. The wizard was accused of having stolen a collier bought by the Cardinal Rohan with the aim to ‘buy’ the favours of Marie Antoinette. Imprisoned, Cagliostro demonstrated that the deception had been plotted out by a wicked countess and one of her lovers. Yes, that little and very elegant man was scary. He appeared out of the blue in 1776 in London, accompanied by his wife, the beautiful “countess serafina”. He said he was born in the Orient or in Malta and had been brought up by the Saint, John knight, heir of the Knights Templar. Ever since, he had travelled around Europe adopting different fantasy names like Achara, Marchese Pellegrini and Count of Cagliostro but never Giuseppe Balsamo. He always denied his humble Sicilian origins. He was a novice who fled the convent of Caltagirone, not an alchemist, but a quack and a forger. This is what judges affirmed and this is the way he went down in history. He certainly wasn’t a Count, but simply a thug who made a living by forcing his wife into prostitution. And she, of course, wasn’t the “contessa serafina”: the priestess who served Osirides religious rites with Cagliostro, but rather was Lorenza Feliciani, an adventuress from Rome. Balsamo himself, a few years before, denounced her for adultery after an affair with a rich man from Paris: Lorenza ended up in prison. We are in 1790: the criminal acts of the Tribunal of the Inquisition draw the identikit of the fraud wizard, of a heretic freemason. Cagliostro was arrested in Rome on the 27th December 1789 where he hoped to obtain the recognition of his Egyptian freemasonry by the Pope. After many months of process, he was sentenced to death, commuted into “perpetual jail in a fortress”. The Calvary starts: forced to forswear Cagliostro walks barefoot from Castel Sant’Angelo to Santa Maria above Minerva church where he kneels asking for forgiveness. It is the 20th of June when the crowd insults him. “A storming night”, writes a journalist of the Moniteur, “the wizard mistakes a thunder for the rumble of a cannon.” < I am here, free me>, he shouts. And the frightened judges transfer him to San Leo. The man who had been venerated like a Saint becomes the masses’ laughing stock. Goethre mocks him in his comic work the Gran Copto. However, among the barrage of insults, the keynotes of a music maker – a freemason like Cagliostro – arise. It is Mozart’s magic flute that pays homage to the wizard. Today the prison is a museum, the dungeons resonate only with the visitor’s steps who slightly shake in front of Cagliostro’s cell. The pilgrimage ends near a plank-bed narrow as a headstone: “no flowers on the Count’s grave, nobody knows where it is, nobody ever found it”. “The ecclesiastic burying”, says the death certificate, “was denied to him. His body had been buried on the west side of a mountain”. Killed by the hardships or murdered by the persecutors? The newspaper of the time talked of murder, the jail chaplain of heart failure. His death, as well as his life, is hidden with mystery. Many people, since that 26 August 1796, swear they have met him.