He had already been to London a few years before, but he returns there. It is 1776 and he now calls himself Count Alessandro of Cagliostro…
But is he that Giuseppe Balsamo born in Palermo in 1743, who had studied with the Friars and who had learned to treat with herbs from the Apothecary Friar? Is he that Balsamo who in Rome in 1768 had married the seductive Lorenza Feliciani with whom he had committed all kinds of scams around Europe? So it was considered, even if there are those who put forward the hypothesis that Balsamo and Cagliostro were two distinct people.
In the absence of documentary evidence to this effect, the Count of Cagliostro, who is now admitted to the Masonic Lodge “la Speranza” in London, continues to be Giuseppe Balsamo for us. Magician, alchemist, healer, he crossed Europe from The Hague to Berlin, from Latvia to Russia, from Poland to the Netherlands, welcomed by princes and powerful.