Black & White Magic in Torino (Part III) & Ballotte
More spine-tingling tales — and a tasty treat to munch on while you give your friends goosebumps!
From Turin’s Simposio!
…Coincidences and magic phenomena are not relegated to a too-far past.
In the early 1900s, Torino sported a quite controversial figure, Gustavo Adolfo Roll, medium.
After a short career in a bank following the steps of his father, at around twenty-three years old, Gustavo discovered his powers and began to practice them through card games, object dematerialization, time traveling, and future telling.
Despite his firm refusal to submit his powers to scientific examination and the hostile criticism from experts, Roll was friended by people of a certain intellectual depth, including Federico Fellini and the Agnelli family. Even a visit by John Fitzgerald Kennedy is reported.
Fellini, who was good friends with Gustavo, related episodes like the dematerialization of an inkwell, the man's metamorphosis into a dwarf and then a giant, and saving a child from a hornet puncture by simply snapping his fingers and instantly knocking down the insect, all in front of him. I'm sorry, I can't help but think of drug use here. Anyway, I do believe in what he preached: the spirit of things - that surely sends us back to Shintoism - and the energy that they absorb, which is intangible and elusive of physical laws.
Ronald Reagan once sent him a telegram thanking him for the help in liberating a NATO captain kidnapped by Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades, an armed terrorist organization of Italy's far-left operating in the late 70s and 80s).
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