Count Cesare Mattei (11 January 1809 - 3 April 1896) was an Italian nobleman, politician, writer and self-taught medical practitioner. He is best known as the founder of electrohomeopathy, a 19th-century alternative medical system that combined homeopathy, herbal preparations, alchemical language and claims concerning bodily or vegetal electricity.
Born in Bologna into a wealthy family of Ferrarese origin, Mattei was among the founders of the Cassa di Risparmio di Bologna in 1837 and briefly took part in the political life of the Papal States during the revolutionary period of 1848. In 1847 he and his brother Giuseppe received the hereditary title of count from Pope Pius IX after donating family holdings near Comacchio to the Papal States. After withdrawing from politics, he acquired the ruins of the medieval Rocca di Savignano and began building Rocchetta Mattei, the eclectic castle in the Bolognese Apennines where he later lived and promoted his medical system.
Mattei's remedies attracted considerable popular attention in Italy and abroad, but they were strongly criticised by physicians and by homeopaths, particularly because the alleged electrical properties of his preparations could not be demonstrated. Historical and medical sources treat electrohomeopathy as an unvalidated or pseudoscientific medical system rather than a scientifically established therapy.
Early life, education and political career
Cesare Mattei was born in Bologna on 11 January 1809, the son of Luigi Mattei and Teresa Montignani. His family, of Ferrarese origin, belonged to the wealthy local bourgeoisie and owned property in the areas of Bologna, Budrio and Comacchio.
Mattei received an education appropriate to his social position and, like Marco Minghetti, was a pupil of the poet and scholar Paolo Costa. He developed liberal ideas but remained politically moderate and opposed to extremism. A later study of Mattei's youth, based partly on Costa's correspondence, emphasises the breadth of this private education, which included literary composition, philosophy, classical authors, visits to works of art, mathematics, astronomy and practical observation. Surviving letters from Costa refer specifically to Mattei's reading of William Herschel, to the study of proportions and trigonometry as preparation for astronomy, and to examining astronomical instruments at the Specola in Bologna. Vannini argues that this formation helps explain the later mixture of empirical, speculative and symbolic elements in Mattei's intellectual profile.
In 1823 the Mattei family enlarged its property by acquiring the fortress of Magnavacca and the surrounding lands near Comacchio. In 1837 Mattei was one of the hundred founders of the Cassa di Risparmio di Bologna.
In 1847 he and his brother Giuseppe donated to Pius IX their holdings on the Magnavacca canal, near Comacchio. The donation had strategic value for the Papal States because of the Austrian military presence in the area, and the pope rewarded the brothers with the hereditary title of count.
During the political upheavals of 1848, Mattei was involved with the Bolognese Civic Guard, serving with the rank of lieutenant colonel and later as chief of staff. He also served with the Bolognese volunteers at the headquarters of Charles Albert of Sardinia and participated in the defence of the Veneto against the Austrian counteroffensive. On 18 May 1848 he was elected to represent the colleges of San Vitale in Bologna and Budrio in the Council of Deputies of the Papal States.
The assassination of Pellegrino Rossi and the flight of Pius IX to Gaeta in November 1848 led Mattei to abandon political life. According to the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, this period also marked the end of his friendship with Minghetti.
Rocchetta Mattei
In 1850 Mattei purchased land containing the ruins of the old Rocca di Savignano, in the upper Reno valley near Riola. On 5 November of that year he laid the first stone of the new castle, which he called the Rocchetta. He settled there permanently from 1859.
The building was initially conceived in a medievalising style, but was later enriched with architectural elements inspired by the Alhambra in Granada and the Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba. Treccani states that the main phase of construction was completed in 1875, although work and alterations continued later. An archival description connects the Moorish additions to Mattei's 1854 visit to the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, London, where historical architectural displays had been installed.
The official Rocchetta Mattei site describes the castle as a labyrinth of towers, monumental staircases, reception rooms and private chambers combining neo-medieval, neo-Renaissance, Moorish and Liberty style elements. The castle became the architectural setting most closely associated with Mattei's public image and with the later memory of his electrohomeopathic enterprise.
The construction and transformation of the Rocchetta during Mattei's lifetime were also recorded by contemporary photography. The Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio in Bologna describes Mattei as the inspirer and designer of the castle, assisted in its realisation by the painter Giulio Ferrari, a master builder and a group of workers who continued to work on the building throughout the count's life. It also identifies the Bolognese photographer Pietro Poppi as an important visual witness to the successive enlargements, alterations and modifications of the castle. Views of the Rocchetta appeared in Poppi's 1879 catalogue under the section "Paysages et villes"; by 1883 they formed a more substantial group, and the 1888 general catalogue of the Fotografia dell'Emilia included a section specifically devoted to a third photographic campaign of Rocchetta Mattei.
The official visitor itinerary preserves several elements reflecting Mattei's taste for historical quotation and symbolic staging. The Cortile dei Leoni is inspired by the Court of the Lions at the Alhambra, and its decorative tiles include the Torre della Visione, which also became the logo of Mattei's medicaments. The Sala della musica is presented as evidence of the Mattei family's musical interests and of documented relations between the family and Gioachino Rossini. The tomb of Mattei, installed in the chapel in accordance with his testamentary wishes, includes astral inscriptions referring to the immensity of the universe and the smallness of human life. One of the inscriptions explicitly refers to stars made visible by Herschel's telescopes.
Family, cultural networks and succession
Mattei's family and private networks were closely connected with the later development of his medical activity, his castle and his estate. His mother, Teresa Montignani, died after a long illness. Treccani states that her death probably played an important role in strengthening Mattei's distrust of official clinical medicine and in directing him towards homeopathy and medical experimentation. The Archivio Museo Cesare Mattei gives a more detailed local account, identifying the illness as breast cancer and presenting it as a decisive biographical trauma in his turn towards medical study.
His brother Giuseppe Mattei was central to the family background of the Rocchetta. Giuseppe married Carolina Brunetti, whose family owned land in the Savignano area. According to the Archivio Museo Cesare Mattei, this connection may have contributed to Cesare Mattei's discovery of the site where he later built the Rocchetta.
The Mattei family's social and cultural network also connected Cesare Mattei with figures of the Italian artistic and political world. The official visitor itinerary of Rocchetta Mattei states that the Sala della musica recalls the family's musical interests and its documented relations with Gioachino Rossini. Surviving correspondence further documents this connection: in an autograph letter written in Paris on 15 December 1863, Rossini addressed Count Luigi Mattei, Giuseppe Mattei's son and Cesare's nephew, who was then following Rossini's Italian property affairs while the composer was living in France. Luigi Mattei later became central to the inheritance crisis surrounding Cesare Mattei's estate.
Mattei never married. His nephew Luigi Mattei, son of Giuseppe and initially regarded as his likely heir, was co-holder of many family properties. In 1887-1888 unsuccessful financial operations by Luigi caused a severe crisis in the family estate: several properties were put up for auction and even the Rocchetta was placed at risk. Cesare Mattei consequently disinherited Luigi and relied increasingly on his collaborator Mario Venturoli, whom he adopted in 1888.
Mario Venturoli, later known as Mario Venturoli-Mattei, had been involved in the administration of the electrohomeopathic business and in the management of Mattei's affairs. The Gruppo Studi Cesare Mattei describes him as the accountant of the central electrohomeopathic depot in Bologna and states that he was adopted by Mattei in recognition of the assistance he gave during the financial crisis caused by Luigi Mattei.
In 1889, when Mattei was about eighty years old, Maria Bonaiuti was born from his relationship with Maria Albina Bonaiuti, known as Agrippina, the housekeeper of the Rocchetta. Despite this, Mattei maintained Mario Venturoli as his universal heir, while recommending in his wills that Maria should be treated with particular care as his daughter.
In 1894 Venturoli married Sofia Condescu, a Romanian woman. The following year, in the context of Mattei's old age and growing conflicts around the inheritance, the count accused Condescu of attempting to poison him with Turkish coffee, expelled both her and Venturoli from the castle and disinherited them.
Electrohomeopathy
After leaving politics, Mattei turned increasingly toward the study and practice of homeopathy. He had no medical degree, but had long been attracted to medical science. Treccani notes that his interest was probably strengthened by his mother's death and by his distrust of official clinical medicine.
Mattei called his system elettromiopatia, while it later became commonly known as elettromeopatia or electrohomeopathy. It drew on homeopathy, phytotherapy, alchemical language and magnetism, and went beyond the principles of Samuel Hahnemann concerning similars and dilutions. Mattei promoted it as a "new science" and claimed that it could treat a large number of diseases, particularly cancer.
The doctrine was never presented in a scientifically precise form. According to Treccani, it appears to have rested on older humoral and temperamental ideas and on Mattei's belief that different parts of the organism contained positive and negative electrical halves, whose equilibrium determined health. His remedies included internal and external preparations, compound homeopathic products and so-called "vegetable electric" liquids. Their composition and method of preparation were kept secret.
The Science Museum Group records a surviving medicine chest of Mattei's electro-homeopathic treatments made in Bologna between 1871 and 1885. The collection description notes that Mattei believed fermented plants emitted electrical energy that could cure illness and that the large bottles were labelled by colours such as red, green, white, yellow and blue, leaving the actual ingredients undisclosed.
Remedies, secrecy and commercial organisation
Mattei's electrohomeopathic system was organised around medicated globules and liquid preparations known in English-language manuals as "electricities". Contemporary and near-contemporary sources associated with Mattei's authorised depots described the globules as small white pills or grains, but distinguished them from ordinary homeopathic sugar pills, stating that they were manufactured in that form and dissolved more slowly. The "electricities" were described as clear liquids, apparently resembling water.