The Golden Gate

Do you know Rome's Magic Door?

Trofei Di Mario, Nymphaeum 226 d.C.

I was trying hard not to grasp at the lure.

That morning I had arranged to see a fellow Substacker for breakfast. We met near the metro stop Vittorio Emanuele on Esquiline Hill, behind Termini station. As we walked past a rather ragged public park, she asked:

“So do you know Rome’s Magic Door?”

My colleague has lived in the city for years and likes to remind me that I’m a rookie here. Was she setting me up?

“Sounds like something out of Harry Potter. Or Allen Ginsberg, “ I replied.

“It’s right there,” she said, pointing through the iron fence that encircled the garden. I saw an imposing Roman ruin that looked like a massive grotto, greenery sprouting up through its crevices.

“No, on the right— over there”, she tried again. Behind another metal gate across from the ruin was a squat stone hut with a white marble door jamb on the front, guarded by what looked like two giant alabaster garden gnomes. A dead tree was rooted in its decaying bricks and mortar.

“It’s all about the inscriptions on the doorframe,” she explained. It was hard to see much, but drawing closer, I could make out what looked like hieroglyphics carved into the marble. “I don’t remember the whole story. Something about a scientist who discovered a chemical formula for making gold. He carved it into the door, but no one’s ever been able to decipher it.”

The symbols were geometric shapes; there was writing on the door as well. Some appeared to be in Hebrew. Other sections were in Latin. I turned to my friend, who writes a newsletter focused on Italian food: “You should make it your recipe of the week. That’ll go viral for sure”.

I noticed there was no actual door—just a rusty metal plate set in the door jamb to block access. It wasn’t clear if there was any space behind it, or if it was just a door imbedded in a thick stone wall. “Are you supposed to enter into it or leave from it?” I asked.

She gave it one last look. “Neither I think.”

Then we went for coffee.

I still wonder what compelled me to return to the Magic Door an hour later. We spoke no more about it, but as soon as I was alone, I returned to the garden at Piazza Vittorio. I must have looked half-mad—one arm slid between the iron rods of the fence, clutching my phone, trying to get one photo that showed clearly the symbols on the door jamb.

A few people stared at what they probably took for an overzealous Instagrammer. Luckily, that section of the park seemed largely populated by junkies and petty criminals. I did hear one British tourist mutter “What the devil has gotten into him?” Probably I should’ve asked myself the same question.

I admit that much of this was about the gold. For those who don’t follow such things, this month the price of gold hit its highest point in recorded history. A standard 400-ounce gold bar is currently worth more than €1.3 million euros. The capability to cook up one or two from scratch would alleviate a lot of the pressures gnawing at me for the past year. I’m not the first man to have been struck by such a fever. €3500 euros per ounce can keep a man up at night.

It did me. C was in New York that week; perhaps she could have talked me down. Instead I worked all night researching, then spent days at the garden. I brought binoculars and once, a magnifying glass with the idea of shooting a photo of the enlarged reflection. Through a friend, I gained access to the Biblioteca Angelica, where I pored through five hundred year old books written in Italian, French and Latin. I tried to copy drawings of symbols and phrases written in languages I don’t understand. I forgot to eat.

Biblioteca Angelica

I did learn that the Porta Magica is the only surviving element of a 17th century villa, the residence of Marquis Massimiliano Savelli Palombara. The Marquis was a well-educated aristocrat with a passion for alchemy and what was known as esotericism— what we would now call the occult. The Magic Door was the entrance to his laboratory.

According to author and bibliophile Francesco Cancellieri: on a stormy night in 1680, a guest at Palombara’s villa, the young alchemist Giuseppe Francesco Borri from Milano, ventured into the garden searching for a particular herb he believed would enable him to produce gold. The next morning, the young doctor had disappeared, but left behind a few flakes of gold and some obscure texts. The Marquis was convinced that Borri’s puzzling symbols and equations held the secret for producing the world’s most precious metal. He engraved the “magic recipe” around his door, hoping one day it could be deciphered.

Giuseppe Francesco Borri

Fascinating stuff I’m sure. But what I cared about was the formula itself— pyramid shapes, circles and half-circles with arrows extending upward— and those were lost on me. The symbols might as well have been postmodern male/female signs on a restroom door. I did recognize the six-pointed star on the pediment—my studies revealed it to be King Solomon’s seal. So what?

My sole aim— to create gold— remained completely out of reach. I’m neither a scientist, nor a linguist, nor a scholar. I needed a partner: someone intelligent enough to solve the riddle and deluded enough to try.

I’ve been told that when you set a goal in life, the universe puts people in your life to help you accomplish it. Apparently this is true whether the ends are good or evil. So it happened that my downstairs neighbor was something of a retired chemist. Dott. DeSantis was not retired because he was old; in fact, he was two years younger than me. It was quite clear that he had been retired because of his mental condition. The doctor lived like a recluse, shuffling out only once a day in his stained, stinking clothes to get his panini at the Mordi’s next door.

I had met DeSantis two months earlier when I brought him a package that had been unceremoniously dumped in front of the building’s post boxes. When I carried it up to his door, he was immensely grateful and urged me in for a coffee. I had always hoped never to return to that awful apartment, reeking of chemicals and the rodents he deemed his laboratory animals.

Now here I was on his doorstep, clutching a bundle of research notes that I pressed on him the moment he opened up. He seemed distracted at first, a little lost. But as he looked through the drawings I had compiled, I saw a thin smile cross his face. In the end, we agreed to be equal partners in whatever came of our efforts. With the flat voice of someone already far away, he suggested I return the following afternoon.

When I went to see DeSantis the next day, I found a changed man. Grabbing my arm, he dragged me to a long table filled with books and glass beakers where he tried to explain: the symbols on the frame of the Magic Door represented the planets, each associated with a metal. Under each symbol on the door is inscribed a phrase. Here was Saturn, which is associated with lead. The inscription reads:

When in your house black crows give birth to white doves, then you will be called wise.

I couldn’t listen to any more of it. “Basta—you’re wasting my time! You know what we’re after… “

What he said next was something I already suspected. The formula was incomplete. He had tried it, but one element was missing. Maybe its symbol had been eroded by time, he suggested. Or it was etched on the doorstep, visible only to someone standing at the gate.

“Or on the other side of the door”, I suggested. “Behind the steel plate. You would have to be inside the villa to see it.” It was the obvious answer.

I have only scattered recall of what came next. C was returning the next day, so I needed to go that night, despite a predicted thunderstorm. It was a blessing of sorts— the sheets of rain provided additional cover when around one in the morning I gracelessly willed myself up and over the fence. I landed on my back in the mud behind the cave-like remains of Villa Palombara. Even as I crawled on my belly through the soaking grass and thorns, my mind and body were super-powered with adrenaline. I knew that I was about to become rich.

I knew too that I would have to kill DeSantis. As soon as I provided him the missing puzzle piece, he would certainly murder me and manufacture the gold on his own. I already had the plot— I would poison him, then put a drop of our precious elixir on his lips. To anyone interested, it would appear exactly like what it was: an experiment gone wrong.

When I reached out to move the heavy plate that blocked the entrance of the Porta Magica, I did not do it cautiously, with a tentative push to see what might lie beyond. I threw my hand out with the force of a punch, palm open, ramming my hand against the rough metal with all the violent desperation that was in my soul at that moment. Reaching for answers, grasping for gold. At the moment of contact, my error was clear.

Like steel straight from the blast furnace, the metal door was as hot as the gate of Hell itself. My hand melted into the surface and the smell of smoldering flesh filled my nostrils. When I finally ripped my hand from the barrier, I had received what I was seeking. The missing symbol, the final element in the equation, was seared into the palm of my hand. I was branded with the mark of the Beast.

The pain in that moment was so all-consuming that I never even felt the three-inch needle that De Santis jabbed into my neck from behind. Thankfully, I was well dead when the doctor kneeled there in the dark, with the ancient empire’s nymphaeum towering behind him, and severed my hand to take back to his apartment.

I don’t know who will find me in the morning. Perhaps it will be one of the sad men that circulate on the edges of this park, victims of fortune or slaves to addiction. At least they will understand something of the appetites that led me here. Or maybe it will be a group of tourists, out to view yet one more of Rome’s eternal mysteries. And so they will discover one— a new addition to the city’s endless collection.

“Do you know Rome’s Magic Door?” I will ask them. Give me your hand.

Wishing all of you a very Happy Halloween!