“Discussions on Alchemy” by Rosanna Balistreri

Saturday, January 27 at 5:30 p.m.

On Saturday, Jan. 27, at 5:30 p.m. on the premises of the “Piero Montana” Center for Art and Culture, located at 64 Bernardo Mattarella Street, writer Rosanna Balistreri will hold “Discussions on Alchemy” talking about its mythical origin and its development throughout history, then explaining in esoteric language the symbols of its three phonominal operations: nigredo, albedo, rubedo, which come to constitute the Opus Alchemicum that is its internal procedure.
Balistreri is a qualified expert on alchemy, having already published two important books on this hermetic science. In particular, the first, “Alchemy and Architecture,” is the one that may be of most interest to us Bagheresi, since in it the writer comes to deal with three of our 18th-century villas: Villa Valguarnera, Villa Palagonia and Palazzo Butera. It is in this, her first book, that Balistreri first provides us with a different reading of them, having discovered that the statues, frescoes, and decorative elements of these villas were not to be considered, only from an aesthetic point of view, as tinsel, as ornaments to embellish these magnificent dwellings but rather as symbolic contents that could not fail to escape secular visitors of a knowledge prior to that of modernity, as symbols of a sacred science, an integral part of the knowledge of Tradition. A knowledge that due to a process of sacralization has been deemed fallacious and replaced by that currently provided to us by our natural sciences.
In talking about alchemy, Balistreri will therefore tell us about this long-forgotten sacred knowledge, which nevertheless cannot fail to exercise even in the eyes of the layman not only curiosity but also a certain fascination arising from the fact, that despite the still current process of secularization, it is part of the immutable eternal Sophia.