Alessandro di Cagliostro

Alessandro Cagliostro

Alessandro Cagliostro

Count Alessandro di Cagliostro (2 June 1743 – 26 August 1795) was the alias of the occultist Giuseppe Balsamo (also called Joseph Balsamo), an Italian adventurer.

McCalman (2003: p. 4) frames the intrigue enveloping Cagliostro and his contemporaries thus:

"His enemies would have been delighted at the neglect of his house. There'd been plenty of them: Casanova, the greatest lover of the age, was bitterly jealous of him; Catherine the Great, empress of Russia, wanted to strangle him; Johann von Goethe, the most revered of Germany's writers, was driven almost mad by hatred of him; King Louis XVI of France persecuted him as a dangerous revolutionary; Queen Marie-Antoinette wanted him locked permanently in the Bastille for involving her in a diamond necklace swindle; and Pope Pius VI accused him of threatening the survival of the Catholic church."^[1]