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The Porta Alchemica ((英語:Alchemical Door)), also known as the Alchemy Gate or Magic Portal, is a monument built between 1678 and 1680 by the Marquis Massimiliano Palombara marquis of Pietraforte in his residence the Villa Palombara. It is located on the Esquiline hill, near Piazza Vittorio, in Rome. This is the only one of five former gates of the villa that remains; there was a lost door on the opposite side dating them to 1680 and four other lost inscriptions on the walls of the mansion inside the villa. == Legends == According to a story collected by the erudite Francesco Cancellieri in 1802, a pilgrim named "stibeum" (from Latin: ''stibium'' = antimony) was hosted in the villa for a night. That night, the pilgrim, identified later by some as the alchemist ''Giustiniani Bono'', searched the gardens of the villa overnight in search of a mysterious herb capable of concocting gold. Legend held that the next morning he was seen to disappear forever through a door, but left behind a few flakes of gold, the fruits of a successful alchemical transmutation, and a mysterious paper full of puzzling symbols and equations, putatively describing the ingredients and process required. Perhaps the paper referred to the ''Voynich'' manuscript, a mysterious document belonging earlier to King Rudolf II of Boemia. The marquis had these symbols engraved on the five gates of the villa Palombara and on the walls of the mansion, hoping that one day they would be translated. A second legend holds that between 1678 and 1680, Giuseppe Francesco Borri, known as ''Giustiniani Bono'', along with Athanasius Kircher and Bernini designed and built the Gate for the Marquis. The Marquis Palombara developed a passion for alchemy in 1656, when he visited the alchemical laboratory in the ''Riario Palace'', now known as the Palazzo Corsini. Patronized by the exiled queen Christina of Sweden, the laboratory was supervised by Pietro Antonio Bandiera and had been visited by Borri and Kircher. This tradition holds the gate was built to memorialize a successful alchemical transmutation the occurred in Riario laboratory. It was rumored that Palombara, Bernini and Kircher were all poisoned on 28 November 1680, probably by Borri, for having revealed the secret formulas through the inscriptions on the gate. Cancellieri published his semi-fanciful account in 1806, including his interpretation of the inscriptions on the Porta Alchimica. His work was published in 1895 in French by Pietro Bornia.〔Bornia published in the April/June 1895 issue of L'Initiation, revue philosophique des hautes etudes〕 It is suggested as well that the geometrical construction of the gate is similar to that of the 21st emblem of Michael Maier’s Atalanta Fugiens (Frankfurt, 1617). 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Porta Alchemica」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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