Alessandro Conte di Cagliostro
(1743 - 1795) Italy

Adventurer
Assumed name of Giuseppe Balsamo. Born at Palermo, Sicily, he travelled widely, married and was an Italian specialist of the "occult".
In Paris, France, he was wrongly involved in the affair of the "diamond necklace" - supposed to have been ordered by Marie Antoinette, but in fact by a band of swindlers - and in 1785 was imprisoned in the Bastille, but then acquitted and freed.
In 1791 he was arrested by the Inquisition in Rome, as he was a leader of the Freemasonry, condemned to life prison, he died in the fortress of San Leo, close to San Marino Republic.
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