Porta Alchemica

Alchemical Door
Porta Alchemica
The Alchemical Door
General information
Location	Rome, Italy
Coordinates	41°53′43″N 12°30′14″E / 41.89541222°N 12.50377122°E / 41.89541222; 12.50377122
Construction started	1678
Completed	1680
Design and construction
Architect	Massimiliano Palombara

The Alchemical Door, also known as the Alchemy Gate or Magic Portal (Italian: Porta Alchemica or Porta Magica), is a monument built between 1678 and 1680 by Massimiliano Palombara, marquis of Pietraforte, in his residence, the villa Palombara, which was 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.

According to a story collected by the erudite Francesco Cancellieri in 1802, a pilgrim named "Stibeum" (from Latin: stibium, which means "antimony") was hosted in the villa for a night. That night, the pilgrim, identified later by some as the alchemist Giuseppe Francesco Borri—known as Giustiniano 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 the king Rudolf II. 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, the same Giuseppe Francesco Borri along with Athanasius Kircher and Gian Lorenzo 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 Riario Palace, now known as 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 that occurred in the Riario Palace. 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.