The idea of Turin as the capital of alternative spirituality was born in the 19th century, with the flourishing in the city of “magnetizers” and “somnambulists.”
Massimo Introvigne*
*Lecture in the City Council Chamber of Settimo Torinese (Turin), January 18, 2024.
Article 1 of 4
“At the end of April 1886, the city of Turin was excited by the strange phenomena of ‘fascination’ caused at the Scribe Theatre by the well-known magnetizer Donato on young men unknown to him. Although all of them were healthy, they voluntarily submitted themselves, before a crowded and astonished audience, to his magnetic maneuvers. Audience and newspapers, educated and uneducated people, scientists and laypersons, took a keen interest in it, and were divided for and against the magnetizer and magnetism.”
Turin 1886: the marvels go on stage. Were these the wonders of science, at least of the “elusive science” of parapsychology? It cannot be immediately ruled out, if we consider the respect with which the author of the passage I have just quoted speaks of Donato, that is, the Belgian magnetizer Alfred D’Hont. He will bequeath to the Italian language even a new verb, “donatizzare” (to Donatize) as a synonym for “hypnotize”. The quote is from the distinguished physician Enrico Morselli, then director of the Turin Psychiatric Hospital.
It was also a matter of the wonders of spiritualism and occultism. Not infrequently. those “magnetized” or “Donatized” claimed to see invisible realities, or to converse with the dead: and who could rule out that they actually saw something? Or were these rather the marvels of religion—or anti-religion? Yes, assured the Jesuit Father Giovanni Giuseppe Franco, a contributor to “Civiltà Cattolica,” for whom these were new “19th-century devilries.” After all, observed the Jesuit father, was not Donato’s appearance “murky,” his gaze “wild,” his eyes of “a vivid carbon black”?
And finally, it was also a marvel of state, of press, of police. The Minister of the Interior sent to Turin — the city of too many marvels—the High Council of Health, with experts also from Milan and Naples. The Council ended up decreeing that the “nervous impressionability of the public” must be kept in mind and that “for the necessary protection of individual liberty, human conscience cannot be allowed to be abolished by practices generating morbid psychic facts in predisposed persons, so as to make one manciple of the will of another, without that person being conscious of the harm he may suffer or produce.” With these arguments—singularly analogous to those one finds used against cults” in our days—Donato’s activities were forbidden.
Perhaps Rome, with its ministries and high councils, was taking revenge on the wonders of Turin. Or perhaps it was a skirmish in a war that the controversy over “cults” makes us believe was born recently, and is instead ancient. Morselli protested Donato’s expulsion from Turin: “I cannot hide my fright,” he wrote, “in the face of the enormous interference that certain authoritarians out of an excess of good heart want to attribute to the state in city life.”
But why, in Turin, the wonders? And why the social, national alarm in the face of the wonders of Turin? This is what we are about to discover with a quick excursion to the nineteenth-century city of wonders, where the presence of bizarre parties, mad hatters, gendarmes, and queens really demands that we take Alice as our guide. In the second part, we will follow Alice again on a more dangerous adventure through the looking glass. We will examine no longer the small real wonders of the submerged and alternative Turin but the great virtual wonders attributed to Turin in the mirror of the collective imagination of urban legends, myths about “devil cities” and “magic triangles,” asking why and where they originated.
This investigation has an interest beyond the specific case of Turin, since the Piedmontese capital is continually being considered as an exemplary figure of a “city of magic.” Whether this exemplarity is real or mythological is precisely what we will try to establish through an investigation of the dimensions not only of magic but also of “alternative spirituality” in the Turin of yesterday and today.
If Donato and his affairs were talked about “from the Alps to Lilybaeum” it was not only because the newspapers were intent—in advance of television—on creating the unity of Italians around the same chronicles reprinted throughout the whole new country. The Donato case, which is not the only famous episode of the same kind in the 19th century, (literally) staged a series of submerged trends that had been present in Turin for several decades.
A first trend is that of the ambiguous encounter between science and the “phenomena” of the occult in magnetism—according to the expression that had been popularized by the German physician Franz Anton Mesmer—and in what would later become known as parapsychology. As has now been amply shown, studies of “somnambulists” and subjects “magnetized” by Mesmer’s disciples did not represent mere curiosities on the fringes of official science, but played a decisive role in the birth of modern psychology. If in this development we generally recognize the role played by Paris and in particular by Jean-Martin Charcot’s Salpêtrière school, we begin to realize that a no less important role on a European scale was played in the 19th century by Turin.
It was certainly, as Clara Gallini has noted , the Turin of positivism, whose triumph had been sanctioned by the controversial decision by Minister Francesco De Sanctis, who in 1861 provocatively called the Dutchman Jacob Moleschott, the champion of the most brutal positivism, to the University of Turin. But precisely positivism was not divorced from a strange fascination with the unknown, the “magnetic,” the occult. In a few years the most daring Italian experimenters of the time in this field gathered in Turin.
Cesare Lombroso, who at the time of the Donato case was already a national authority on criminology and had been working on magnetism for some years, headed the forensic laboratory in Turin. It was precisely by studying the Donato case in depth that he would increasingly focus his studies on this field. But already in 1881 Gaetano Salvioli had been studying somnambulists in the Turin asylum, whose director since 1880 was the aforementioned Enrico Morselli, perhaps the Italian scientist most interested in magnetism. And—in the same years as the Donato case—other scientists such as Giuseppe Musso, Eugenio Tanzi, Angelo Mosso, and Ezio Sciamanna were consolidating in this field of research what appeared to be a more than national record.
Of course, as we have already seen in Donato’s case, not everything remained in the universities. Magnetizers and “somnambulists” did not attend Turin only to be observed by scientists. They also performed in theatres and, more often, in “private magnetic consultations” on the dead and the future, on health and illness. Depending on style and skill, they were found in the melancholy shacks of Porta Palazzo, alongside jugglers and prostitutes, or in the elegant “magnetic cabinets” on Via Roma or Via Lagrange.
Every so often, some customers spent a little too much and protested. Then the public authorities would intervene, and eventually they acted in force and in spectacular fashion. In 1890 the “somnambulists’ trial” was held at the Turin courthouse and caught the attention of the national press. There are sixteen defendants: there were all the uptown magnetizers who called themselves “professors” and “doctors” and even a real medical doctor, Fortunato Brizio, who had become a friend and protector of the magnetizers. Journalists had a field day in describing the “somnambulists” who partnered with the “magnetizers.” Such was the famous “Leopolda,” that is, Caterina Filippa Accattino, “a wretch who looks like the portrait of pain and misery” with “the glassy eyes and bewildered look of epileptics.” On the contrary, assured the press of the time, Maddalena Bongiovanni had “a face of a true pythoness,” “with a large curved nose that makes conversation with her sharp chin turned upward, and with two small, gray, mischievous eyes that give her the air of a soothsayer a mile away.”
Reporters were amused, but the judges were not too harsh. Conviction of fraud in the first instance, but with sentences not exceeding three months; acquittal of fraud on appeal, since “it is not incumbent on the court to resolve the question (…) as to the existence and effects of magnetic somnambulism” and the “deception or fraudulent artifice” typical of the crime was lacking. After all, “the patrons voluntarily presented themselves at the appellants’ magnetic cabinets perfectly aware of what was being practiced there and the prices charged for each consultation.”
As can be seen, the issues were not too much different from those discussed in contemporary trials targeting magicians and alleged “cults.” But in the meantime, Turin had returned to the national headlines of the marvelous.