Posts Tagged ‘Balsamo’

Johann Strauss – Cagliostro in Wein (Cagliostro in Vienna) – overture to the the operetta

März 27th, 2012 | admin

Count Alessandro di Cagliostro (2 June 1743 26 August 1795) was the alias for the occultist Giuseppe Balsamo (also called Joseph Balsamo), an Italian adventurer. He was born to a poor family in Albergheria, which was once the old Jewish Quarter of Palermo, Sicily Cagliostro claimed to be the son of the Prince and Princess of the Anatolian Christian Kingdom of Trebizond, orphaned and reared by the Grand Master of the Knights of Malta and, for several years, in the household of the Sheriff of Medina (who brought him up as a Christian.) He was prosecuted in the affair of the diamond necklace which involved Marie Antoinette and Prince Louis de Rohan, and was held in the Bastille for nine months but finally acquitted, when no evidence could be found connecting him to the affair. Nonetheless, he was asked to leave France, and departed for England. Here he was accused by Theveneau de Morande of being Giuseppe Balsamo, which he denied in his published Open Letter to the English People, forcing a retraction and apology from Morande. Cagliostro left England to visit Rome, where he met two people who proved to be spies of the Inquisition. Some accounts hold that his wife was the one who initially betrayed him to the Inquisition. On 27 December 1789, he was arrested and imprisoned in the Castel Sant’Angelo. Soon afterwards he was sentenced to death on the charge of being a Freemason. The Pope changed his sentence, however, to life imprisonment in the Castel Sant’Angelo. After …

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