ALCHEMY AND PROTO-CHEMISTRY IN ROME

Among furnaces, secrets and transformations

In 1317 Pope John XXII condemned alchemy. In the following centuries his successors maintained distillation workshops in the apostolic palaces and libraries cataloguing Arabic manuscripts of Jabir ibn Hayyan alongside Galen's treatises. Alchemy thrived on ambiguity — and in Rome that ambiguity had a precise geography.

Six stops from the Roman Forum to the Accademia dei Lincei: from the metallurgical laboratories of antiquity to the perpetual fire of the Vestal Virgins; from the Angelica Library, where Jabir circulated alongside Paracelsus, to the Roman College, where the Jesuit Kircher separated mineralogical chemistry and the transmutation of metals. Then the workshops of Trastevere —tanners, dyers, apothecary friars— and finally the Accademia dei Lincei, where Cesi tried to draw the definitive boundary between chemistry and alchemy.