Benvenuto Cellini’s autobiography contains an extraordinary account of two night visits to Rome’s Colosseum with a priest who claimed to practise necromancy. Cellini describes crowds of demons, a terrified young assistant and a prediction that he would be reunited with a woman he loved. The episode mixes supernatural menace, personal bravado, comic relief and an eventual claim that the prediction came true.
It is a valuable historical account of a reported experience and of how its author chose to tell it. It is not a set of independently collected witness statements. Cellini wrote his life story decades after the Roman episodes, and the dialogue and dramatic details reach us through his narrative. The paranormal claims are therefore classified as Insufficient evidence, without dismissing the text’s importance as a record of Renaissance storytelling and belief.
Curiosity and a personal request
In Book I, chapter LXIV, Cellini introduces an unnamed Sicilian priest, learned in Latin and Greek. Their conversation turned to necromancy, and Cellini expressed a longstanding wish to learn about it. The priest offered to satisfy his curiosity if he had the courage to take part.
Cellini’s personal concern was Angelica, a Sicilian woman from whom he had become separated. The preceding narrative describes his attempts to find her and a letter saying that she was in Sicily. His question to the supposed spirits was therefore specific and personal: reunion with Angelica. The story is not presented as a neutral experiment in whether apparitions existed.
For the first visit, Cellini says he brought his friend Vincenzio Romoli, while the priest brought a companion from Pistoia. They went to the Colosseum after preparations involving ceremonial objects, fire and scented materials. Cellini describes the amphitheatre filling with demons after a prolonged invocation. His request about Angelica received no answer that night, although he says the experience satisfied his curiosity.
A second night at the Colosseum
The priest proposed another attempt and asked Cellini to bring a young boy. Cellini selected a shop assistant aged about twelve. Romoli returned, and Agnolino Gaddi joined them. The memoir attributes different functions to the participants rather than depicting a crowd of uninvolved spectators who happened upon a haunting.
On the second night, Cellini says the supernatural assembly became far more numerous. The priest conveyed a reply that he would be where Angelica was within a month. Immediately afterwards, the account turns from apparent success to danger: the priest said more formidable spirits had arrived than he had intended to summon and that they had to be dismissed carefully.
The young assistant supplied the most vivid descriptions. He reportedly cried out that threatening men surrounded them and that four giants were trying to enter the protected circle. Later he said the Colosseum was on fire and the flames were advancing. These are claims attributed to the boy within Cellini’s recollection. They should not be recast as identical observations independently confirmed by every adult present.
Fear, reassurance and laughter
Cellini portrays himself as trying to encourage the others while admitting that he too was deeply frightened. The priest’s terror particularly alarmed him. At one point he reassured the assistant that the threatening beings were inferior to them and described what he saw as smoke and shadow. That remark belongs to the scene’s dialogue; it is not a later technical explanation proving what produced the visions.
The tension then breaks through a conspicuously earthy comic episode involving Gaddi. Cellini laughs, the boy becomes less frightened and reports that the demons are retreating. The party remains until the morning bells, after which the priest concludes the ceremony and packs away his books.
That mixture of fear and comedy is central to the passage. A summary consisting only of giants and flames loses the way Cellini tells the story, including his interest in his own courage and in his companions’ reactions. Conversely, the humorous turn does not by itself prove that nothing frightening was experienced. The surviving evidence is the memoir’s account, with its literary shaping intact.
Visions on the way home
The party left closely huddled together, with the boy holding the priest and Cellini. As they returned towards their homes in the Banchi district, the assistant reportedly continued to see two of the demons skipping over roofs and the ground ahead of them. Again, this particular observation is attributed to him.
Cellini does not supply a separately written account by the assistant, Romoli, Gaddi or the priest alongside his own. Naming companions is historically informative, but it does not turn their reactions as narrated by Cellini into several surviving independent sources. The account also contains no photograph, measured light record or contemporary investigation capable of establishing the identity of the apparitions.
The proposed journey that was not another encounter
In chapter LXV, the priest urges Cellini to help consecrate a book and seek hidden treasure. He proposes the hill country of Norcia as a suitable place and tells a story about a previous practitioner near Farfa. Cellini is tempted but also absorbed in his medal-making work and rivalry with another artist.
This proposed expedition should not be counted as a third documented encounter or mapped as another place Cellini witnessed spirits. The passage describes persuasion and plans. It also shows that the priest’s interest extended beyond Cellini’s romantic request to a much broader promise of wealth and magical assistance.
As the month’s end approached, the priest repeated his assurance about Angelica and warned Cellini about danger. Cellini instead concentrated on finishing his artistic work. His competing ambitions are part of the narrative’s explanation for what he did next, rather than incidental decoration around an isolated ghost story.
The claimed fulfilment in Naples
The autobiography returns to the prediction in chapter LXVIII. Travelling towards Naples with Solosmeo, Cellini encounters an innkeeper and asks about Angelica and her mother. The innkeeper says women with the names he gives have recently returned to a nearby house. Cellini says he found Angelica there and was reunited with her.
He then explicitly connects the reunion with the month promised in the necromantic circle. It would be incomplete to end his story at the Colosseum without mentioning this claimed fulfilment. It would be equally misleading to present it as a prediction verified independently of the memoir. The timing, remembered promise and reported reunion all come through Cellini’s own retrospective arrangement of events.
The passage does not establish that he had no ordinary opportunity to find Angelica or that a supernatural source supplied information unavailable by other means. The encounter with an innkeeper provides a recognisably human route to the address in the narrative itself. That observation limits an inference of paranormal proof without establishing a complete explanation for everything Cellini said happened.
Dates, evidence and assessment
The edition’s introduction places composition of the autobiography between 1558 and 1566. The Roman events belong earlier in his sixteenth-century life. The chapters reviewed do not supply a secure calendar date for the two nights, so this record leaves the incident-year filter unassigned rather than substituting the writing dates or guessing a precise year.
The primary material establishes that Cellini told this story. It supplies detail about people, expectations, fear, claimed visions and the meaning he later gave the episode. It does not establish the physical presence of demons. Nor does it provide enough controlled evidence to choose conclusively among staged effects, misperception, psychological influences or later narrative invention. Those possibilities are not adopted here as demonstrated causes.
Location and present-day visiting
Approximate map area: 41.8901, 12.4926, a rounded Colosseum monument reference from Miko Flohr’s archaeological place record. Cellini names the amphitheatre, but the precise place within it used for the ceremonies is not established. The pin is a venue-area reference, not a reconstructed ritual spot or a confirmed apparition position.
The Colosseum is now a managed heritage attraction. The official park page confirms timed-entry booking and published opening arrangements. Visitors should use the current official access and ticket information; this account does not authorise night-time entry or access outside the visitor arrangements. Access checked 13 November 2026.
Sources and image
Read Cellini’s autobiography, translated by John Addington Symonds, Book I, chapters LXIII–LXV for Angelica and the two Colosseum visits, and LXVIII for the claimed reunion. Project Gutenberg supplies the public-domain text used here. The archaeological Colosseum place record supplies the coordinate reference. The memoir’s supernatural claims and its later narrative form should be evaluated together.
The lead image is Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s 1757 view of the Colosseum, a public-domain work reproduced through Wikimedia Commons. It is more than a century later than Cellini’s account and illustrates the historical setting; it does not depict his party, the ceremonies or the reported spirits. Sources and image rights checked 13 November 2026.
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