Today we talk about one of my favorite Roman curiosity, a true secret jewel of our city.
Let’s step back in time. As we know, before the birth of the scientific method and science of modern chemistry, alchemy flourished, a pseudoscience that mingled fruit of knowledge, philosophy, art, but also of superstition, astrology, esotericism. The alchemists were a sort of modern witches, their knowledge was usually kept secret, or were revealed to a small circle of followers or enlightened.
We are in 1680. During this period, the present Piazza Vittorio Emanuele II, a short walk from Termini Station, it was a simple stroke of the countryside outside the city walls, occupied for the most part from the estate of the Marquis Massimiliano villa Palombara principles Rosicrucians. The Marquis was a fine scholar, known in Rome as passionate about occultism and esoteric: he practiced such interest is in first person hosting and funding Research Department of the others at this laboratory in his mansion. In particular, the garden of the villa, which perhaps gave access to his laboratory, he was completely thought out in detail in a symbolic way: access to this small park was among other things be taken as an input to a higher knowledge and metaphysics.
Legend has it that one of the guests of the Marquis, in the course of his studies, he succeeded in what had been for centuries one of the main goals of alchemy: turning lead into gold. The scholar was soon lost track of him, but left the “recipe” in some of his notes which, however, proved incomprehensible to the Marquis, being written using, as was customary among the alchemists, arcane metaphors and puzzle difficult to decipher. The Marquis, in the typical style that characterized him, he thought well that what for him was incomprehensible, could be easily interpreted by someone else. For this reason he decided to “publish the recipe” on the front door of the garden of his villa, ie the so-called “magic door” or “door alchemy.”
Well, now the villa and the garden does not exist anymore, but the magic door is still there, embedded in a wall of the gardens of Piazza Vittorio, and is one of the few monuments alchemy in the world. Unfortunately it is behind a high fence into the realm of abandonment, and really just the number of cats in the area can admire it up close, but it still bears the engraved mysterious and fascinating phrases and hermetic symbols.
For fans of puzzles like me among the many intriguing recordings, personally love the phrase on the step, for those who through the door: “It is not sedes” (ie: “If you sit, not leftovers”) by reading the contrary, that is, from right to left, turning it (and thus in practice …. coming out), you get: “It is not sedes” (ie: “If you sit down, leftovers”).
So let us follow the advice and do not sit down, let’s move on to think, because maybe some of us … will solve the riddle.