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In his delightful "Memoirs," Benvenuto Cellini (1500-1571) describes with great vividness some experiments he…

Date of account: Published 1911
Source: Stranger Than Fiction: Being Tales from the Byways of Ghosts and Folk-lore
Reference: Stranger Than Fiction: Being Tales from the Byways of Ghosts and Folk-lore · selected passage 3
Rights: public_domain
Language: English
Record updated: 2026-08-24

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Read the available text below. Archive transcriptions may contain OCR errors; later context is labelled separately. A recorded claim is not a finding that it happened.

Source passage

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In his delightful "Memoirs," Benvenuto Cellini (1500-1571) describes with great vividness some experiments he conducted with a necromancer at Rome, in order to discover the whereabouts of a girl he loved. The magician was a Sicilian priest, "a man of genius and well versed in the Latin and Greek authors," who made an appointment with Cellini for a certain evening, desiring him to bring two companions. "I invited Vincenzo Romoli ... he brought with him a native of Pistoja, who cultivated the black art himself." The trio then repaired to the Colosseum, where the priest "... began to draw circles upon the ground with the most impressive ceremonies imaginable...." After this sort of thing and many incantations had lasted an hour and a half, "there appeared several legions of devils, insomuch that the amphitheatre was quite filled with them." This terrible phenomenon sounds dreadful enough to have frightened most people, but obtaining no result from his inquiries on the first occasion, Cellini was intrepid enough to arrange for a second experiment, his account of which absolutely bristles with demons and bad spirits; the strange part being that he writes as if their

Historical context

Contextual commentary · mention only

This material belongs to a folklore tradition. Story type, collector, community, transmission and literary editing matter when comparing it with other sources.

Modern context

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