Cagliostro, Alessandro, Count of

CAGLIOSTRO, ALESSANDRO, count of. — Famous adventurer of the eighteenth century. His real name was Giuseppe Balsamo, born in 1743 to prosperous Palermitans; in Palermo he received his early education at a seminary, and later at Caltagirone among the Fatebenefratelli. Expelled from there, he returned to Palermo, where, by stealing, forging, committing swindles, and worse, he earned imprisonment. As soon as he was free, he took flight into the world. He was in the East and in Egypt, acted as an abbot in Rome and there married his accomplice in wrongdoing, Lorenza Feliciani; he was in Barcelona, Madrid, London, Paris, Bordeaux, Brussels, Munich, Strasbourg, and Petersburg. In London he assumed the name of Count Cagliostro. Having learned of Freemasonry, he founded a sect of it which he claimed followed the Egyptian rite and proclaimed himself the Grand Copt, managing through celebrated tricks to achieve triumphs and make a great deal of money. Expelled from Paris because of the affair of the Necklace, in which illustrious personages were involved, he returned to Rome in 1789 and began practising medicine in the Piazza di Spagna and gathering proselytes to his sect near Piazza Farnese. Arrested and tried by the Holy Inquisition, he was condemned to death; but Pius VI commuted the sentence by confining him in the fortress of S. Leo, where he died in 1795, amid repentance and recantations, but ultimately unrepentant.