Her children thought she was Romanian from Romania, asked, and she said she was as an Italian Gypsy from Rome, The Actress, performing on the stage in Paris, meeting here their Dad, falling in love, he talked a lot, making her to loss a head, in love, she was moving with him to his land to Poland and to Siberia after in Russia too.
But really, they all were Old Russian Orthodox Church believes, really religious people, as Christian fanatics, never forget to pray to live by a rules.
There were not plenty visitors from Sicily, Italy, to Russian Impair.
One of a famous visitors was
Count Alessandro di Cagliostro
Alessandro di Cagliostro
(Giuseppe Balsamo)
(Prince Felix),
born in Sicily,
from his Jewish mother (and unknown father).
Count Alessandro di Cagliostro (Giuseppe Balsamo)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alessandro_Cagliostro
From Wikipedia:
Count Alessandro di Cagliostro
(2 June 1743 - 26 August 1795) (18 century)
was the alias of the occultist
Giuseppe Balsamo;
in French usually referred to as
Joseph Balsamo.
Cagliostro
was an Italian adventurer
and self-styled magician.
He became a glamorous figure
associated with the royal courts of Europe
where he pursued various occult arts,
including psychic healing, alchemy and scrying.
His reputation lingered for many decades after his death, but continued to deteriorate, as he came to be regarded as a charlatan and impostor, this view fortified by the savage attack of Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) in 1833, who pronounced him the "Prince of Quacks".
Later works-such as that of W.R.H. Trowbridge (1866-1938) in his Cagliostro: the Splendour and Misery of a Master of Magic (1910)-attempted a rehabilitation.
The history of Cagliostro is shrouded in rumour, propaganda, and mysticism. Some effort was expended to ascertain his true identity when he was arrested because of possible participation in the Affair of the Diamond Necklace.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe relates in his Italian Journey that the identification of Cagliostro with Giuseppe Balsamo was ascertained by a lawyer from Palermo who, upon official request, had sent a dossier with copies of the pertinent documents to France.
Goethe met the lawyer in April 1787 and saw the documents and Balsamo's pedigree:
Balsamo's great-grandfather
Matteo Martello
had two daughters:
Maria, who married
Giuseppe Bracconeri;
and
Vincenza, who married
Giuseppe Cagliostro.
Maria and Giuseppe Bracconeri
had three children:
Matteo;
Antonia; and
Felicit;,
who married
Pietro Balsamo
(the son of a bookseller,
Antonino Balsamo,
who had declared bankruptcy before dying at age 44).
The son of
Felicita and Pietro Balsamo was
Giuseppe,
who was christened with the name of his great-uncle and eventually adopted his surname, too.
Felicit; Balsamo was still alive in Palermo at the time of Goethe's travels in Italy, and he visited her and her daughter.
Cagliostro himself stated during the trial following
the Affair of the Diamond Necklace
that he had been born of Christians of noble birth but abandoned as an orphan upon the island of Malta.
He claimed to have travelled as a child to Medina, Mecca, and Cairo and upon return to Malta to have been admitted to the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, with whom he studied alchemy, the Kabbalah, and magic.
Early life
Giuseppe Balsamo
was born to a poor family in
Albergheria,
which was once
the old Jewish Quarter of
Palermo, Sicily.
Despite his family's precarious financial situation, his grandfather and uncles made sure the young Giuseppe received a solid education:
he was taught by a tutor and later became a novice in
the Catholic Order of St. John of God,
from which he was eventually expelled.
During his period as a novice in the order,
Balsamo learned chemistry as well as a series of spiritual rites.
In 1764, when he was twenty one,
he convinced
Vincenzo Marano
-a wealthy goldsmith-
of the existence of a hidden treasure
buried several hundred years
previously at Mount Pellegrino.
The young man's knowledge of the occult, Marano reasoned, would be valuable in preventing the duo from being attacked by magical creatures guarding the treasure.
In preparation for the expedition to Mount Pellegrino, however,
Balsamo requested
seventy pieces of silver
from Marano.
When the time came for the two to dig up the supposed treasure, Balsamo attacked Marano, who was left bleeding and wondering what had happened to the boy-in his mind, the beating he had been subjected to had been the work of djinns.
The next day, Marano paid a visit to
Balsamo's house in
via Perciata
(since then renamed via
Conte di Cagliostro),
where he learned the young man had left the city.
Balsamo (accompanied by two accomplices) had fled to the city of Messina.
By 1765-66,
Balsamo found himself on the island of
Malta,
where he became an auxiliary (donato)
for
the Sovereign Military Order of Malta
and
a skilled pharmacist.
Travels
In early 1768
Balsamo
left for Rome,
where he managed to land himself a job
as
a secretary to
Cardinal Orsini.
The job proved boring to Balsamo and he soon started leading a double life, selling magical "Egyptian" amulets and engravings pasted on boards and painted over to look like paintings.
