Episode Two: All the Pope’s Men
In the first episode, we left Riccardo Galeazzi on the threshold of history: an eye doctor with a gambler’s pulse, a man who would one day become inseparable from Eugenio Pacelli — who was not yet Pope Pius XII — and then infamous for a funeral catastrophe the Vatican would prefer to forget.
There is, however, a quieter prelude to scandal: the question of how these two men met. The folklore is abundant; the documents are stubborn. What follows are four competing versions — each plausible, each compromised.
Version One: The Speck of Dust
On June 28, 1930, cardinal Pacelli walks up Via Sistina and feels a sting in his eye.
He glances around, sees an oversized sign — STUDIO OCULISTICO RICCARDO GALEAZZI — and steps inside.
It’s irresistible as an anecdote (chance as destiny), but Galeazzi himself later warns against it in his memoir In the Shadow and the Light of Pius XII: great churchmen do not entrust their bodies, let alone their eyes, to a stranger on a whim.
The sign of Galeazzi’s practice, seen in an AI-restored image that in fact depicts the sign at a later time — most likely in the 1950s — by which time Galeazzi had long since added the second surname, Lisi.
Page from Riccardo’s book containing the passage: ‘It has been said that, happening to pass along Via Sistina, Eugenio Pacelli had seen my plaque and wanted to come up to have his eyes examined. Nothing could be more fanciful! An ecclesiastical personality never goes “by chance” to a doctor’s office; he chooses carefully and always has himself announced.’
The page also includes a rebuttal of the second version — that Pacelli had gone to get eyeglasses.
Version Two: The Spectacles
Pacelli came for eyeglasses. Except Galeazzi never sold them.
This is written by Galeazzi himself in his autobiography, and corroborated by a journalist who spent time in the practice as children, Bruno Bartoloni, who remembered a large, sparsely populated room, the Snellen chart, the instruments, and not a single display case of frames.
Riccardo was a clinician, not a shopkeeper.
Version Three: The Duchess
Monsignor Quirino Paganuzzi later claimed that a society grandee — the Irish-American philanthropist Genevieve Garvan Brady — recommended Galeazzi to Pacelli.
Perhaps. The 1930s Vatican was not short on cultivated women with access; still, it is difficult to picture a punctilious, old-world prelate like Pacelli entrusting his private medical concerns to a salon…
What is certain is that on June 28, 1930, at 4 Via Sistina, the two men met — and neither forgot the other.
Galeazzi admits as much: “The nobility of his face and the sweetness of his voice… enrolled me among his admirers at once.”
Soon, Galeazzi was no longer merely an ophthalmologist. He had become what he would remain for nearly three decades: the cardinal’s (and later the pope’s) physician of first resort.
A Doctor, a Psychologist, a Priest
Enter the word many readers will wish to underline: homeopathy. In 1932, Galeazzi founded the Roman Homeopathic Center in his own practice on Via Sistina and invited the eminent Dr. Antonio Negro to join its board. This is not hearsay. In the archives of the Museo dell’Omeopatia on Piazza Navona, the paperwork still breathes under glass.
What did “homeopathy” mean in this milieu? Not talismans and tinctures traded in back corridors—though there were plenty of charlatans then as now—but a method that insisted on lentezza: the slow, exhaustive anamnesis of a person as a person. The homeopathic physician, Antonio Negro liked to say (his son repeats the formula with undimmed conviction), is at once doctor, psychologist, and—dangerous word, but apt—priest. He observes preferences (cold or heat, sea or mountains), dreams, the hour at which pain bites. He looks for the seam where body and story have frayed.
Does that aura of total care explain Pacelli’s choice of an eye specialist as personal physician? Partly. A patient whose ailments ranged from gastritis to arrhythmia, chronic hiccups to dislocating joints, low blood pressure to a creeping arthritis that would stiffen his right arm—such a man has reasons to value a listener who treats every complaint as a thread in one tapestry. Galeazzi offered exactly that: a unity of attention. Whether you call the drops and pellets medicine or metaphor, he produced the result that matters most to a patient in high office—relief reliably delivered by a trusted hand.
It is not manipulation to say so. It is fidelity to the record.
A Prophecy and a Destiny
The story cannot be told without tracing the rise of Pius XII.
Eugenio Pacelli, born in Rome in 1876 to a devout Catholic family, seemed destined for the Church from childhood.
Many anecdotes surrounded his birth. One is recounted in Andrea Tornielli’s Pio XII. Eugenio Pacelli. Un uomo sul trono di Pietro (Tornielli, 2007).
A priest named Don Jacobacci is said to have stepped forward at Eugenio’s baptism, lifted the infant Pacelli high in his arms, and declared,
“Sixty-three years from today, Eugenio Pacelli will be pope!”
The story, however, did not appear until decades later, in a hagiographic pamphlet, and was almost certainly invented. Even so, it lent Pacelli’s life an enduring aura of destiny.
As a boy, Eugenio Pacelli dressed up as a priest and staged masses at home. He studied at the Liceo Classico Statale “Ennio Quirino Visconti”, a fashionable school in Rome that he later described as anticlerical and freemason in spirit.
There he wrote an early self-portrait, describing himself as mediocre in appearance, prone to impatience yet quick to forgive (Tornielli, 2007). Handwriting expert Evi Crotti, as cited in Tornielli (2007), identified in his handwriting an absolute control of aggressive impulses, deliberately suppressed at great personal cost, leading to psychosomatic symptoms.
Pacelli rose quickly. He became a priest at twenty-three, an expert in canon law, and then a gifted diplomat. In the nineteen twenties he became the Vatican’s leading envoy to Germany, negotiating concordats to protect Catholic minorities.
But his most fateful act came in 1933, when, as Secretary of State under Pius XI, he signed the Reichskonkordat with Hitler’s Germany. The photograph below shows the historic moment.
Cardinal Pacelli signs the Concordat with Reich officials. Photograph from the Lebendiges Museum Online, colorized by Palette.fm.
Defended at the time as a way to shield Catholics, it later became one of the most controversial agreements in Vatican history.
Six years later, when the cardinals gathered in conclave, they elected him pope. On March 3rd, 1939, Eugenio Pacelli became Pius XII, just as Europe slid into the abyss of war.
Within days of his election, a mystery surfaced in the Vatican.
A relatively unknown ophthalmologist, Dr. Riccardo Galeazzi Lisi, suddenly began appearing at the papal apartments. He had no official appointment, yet moved in and out with striking ease.
Cardinal Francesco Marmaggi, head of the powerful Congregazione del Concilio —effectively the Vatican’s “interior ministry” — summoned a physician for a discreet briefing.
“A well-known Roman physician was informed that Cardinal Marmaggi wished to speak with him; he would not, however, receive him in the Palace of the Congregations in Piazza San Callisto, but in his modest villa on the Janiculum Hill. Cardinal Marmaggi […] was then Prefect of the Sacred Congregation of the Council, meaning that he headed what is considered the Ministry of the Interior of the Church. From the Cardinal, a true-born Trastevere native, the physician was addressed in Roman dialect with an unexpected question: “Who exactly is this Professor Riccardo Galeazzi?” At that time the professor was called simply Galeazzi; the addition of the surname Lisi came later, following an inheritance. Cardinal Marmaggi explained plainly why he wished to be informed about Professor Galeazzi. He was seen not infrequently in the Vatican, in the papal apartment: always impassive, with that expressionless face. […] Since the second of March the oculist had in effect continued to be the Pope’s physician, though without having been formally appointed. […] The Pope intended to appoint Galeazzi as Pontifical Archiater. But did he have the qualifications to hold so lofty and so responsible a position? […] Yet the Roman physician, questioned that day, thought it appropriate to report to the prelate what was being said in Roman medical circles about the oculist Galeazzi, who even then had his practice at number 4 Via Sistina […]. It was a spacious, well-equipped modern practice, consisting of several rooms, and beneath the windows ran a large conspicuous sign, plainly an eyesore. Now that very sign, which was at the time quite a novelty in the Roman medical world, as well as the plaque on the doorway with the indications “Cataract operations – Corrections of myopia – Electrical treatments,” had provoked the intervention of the Medical Association, presided over by Dr. Lazé. He had met with his colleague Galeazzi and had called his attention to that sign and those inscriptions, which had aroused the criticism of Roman physicians. But Galeazzi had left the sign where it was. A second intervention, in the same year, was undertaken, again without any result, by the Italian Ophthalmological Society, then presided over by Senator Ovio. Furthermore, some Roman physicians disapproved of the way Professor Galeazzi flaunted the therapeutic virtues, in matters of eye diseases, of a lotion he called “of the friar of Bergamo.” No matter how much research was done, nothing was ever discovered about that friar. But this remark may also have been the product of the possible jealousy of certain professionals toward their more fortunate colleague, who had a splendid practice in the heart of Rome and was beginning to count on a numerous clientele. […] Cardinal Marmaggi, who had received the same information from other physicians as well, hinted that there was nothing to be done. Professor Galeazzi would be appointed Archiater by the Pope, and his name would officially appear among the members of the pontifical household. This is exactly what happened the following year.”
(article by Rocco Morabito)
The Devil’s Hour
Who was Riccardo Galeazzi Lisi?
To understand, one must go back to his origins.
Birth Certificate of Riccardo Galeazzi Lisi
Riccardo Arturo Domenico Filippo Maria Galeazzi was born in Rome at 3:10 a.m. on July 26, 1891, ten minutes after what Italian folklore called the Devil’s Hour, a sinister inversion of Christ’s death at 3 p.m.
His childhood was marked by trauma. In December 1900, his beloved older sister Virginia died suddenly at age 15.
Death Certificate of Virginia Galeazzi, aged fifteen, daughter of Goffredo Galeazzi and Emma Lisi, who were also the parents of Riccardo
Riccardo, then nine, experienced a temporary decline in his eyesight. An ophthalmologist’s care inspired his future vocation.
As a young man Riccardo studied medicine and served as an army doctor in the First World War. The horrors of the front haunted him. Back in Rome, he looked for adrenaline wherever he could find it: at poker tables and behind the wheel of racing cars. Under the pseudonym “Maometto” (Muhammad), he raced Maseratis and lived recklessly, gambling away fortunes and winning them back in single nights.
In the photo, a relatively young Riccardo Galeazzi Lisi is at the wheel of a Maserati Tipo V4 16 cylinder. A legendary car of incalculable value. Designed to dominate the second Monza Grand Prix of September 15, 1929, Riccardo’s V4 was the first car to be fitted with two Grand Prix engines and two prototype carburetors crafted by Edoardo Weber himself to keep them in balance. Powered by an experimental mixture of gasoline, benzole, and ether, this car could reach speeds of 260 kilometers per hour. Driven by Baconin Borzacchini, it set Maserati’s first-ever world record — with a staggering average of 246 kilometers per hour — finished third at Monza and at the sixth Coppa Acerbo, and won the sixth Tripoli Grand Prix.
Page from Riccardo’s file at the Ministry of the Interior, Directorate-General for Public Security. The note is dated October 28, 1958, and records, among other things, that “the former Archiater has a passion for gambling and is said to have repeatedly lost substantial sums in Monte Carlo.”
Charlatans and Miracles
In 1929, Rome buzzed with the arrival of Fernando Asuero, a Basque doctor hailed as el doctor milagroso. At the Grand Hotel Excelsior on Via Veneto, the wealthy and the desperate flocked to his bizarre nasal “trigeminal therapy,” said to cure everything from sciatica to Parkinson’s. Newspapers alternated between ridicule and sensationalism. Patients swore by him, others denounced him as a fraud.
This image, from the archives of Dr. Fernando Asuero, is said to show the before-and-after of a miraculous cure performed on a member of the Guardia Civil. It appears in the scientific article “Las curaciones prodigiosas del doctor Asuero: trastornos neurológicos psicogénicos en la población española” by Dr. S. Giménez-Roldán, published in Neurosciences and History, 2015; 3(2): 49–60.
An Italian disciple, Benedetto Vincenzini, promoted his own variant — “nasal reflex therapy” — using cocaine for anesthesia.
Promotional booklet for Dr. Benedetto Vincenzini’s treatments.
The text includes the phrase: “the minor operation is entirely without risk, bloodless, and absolutely painless, because it is carried out, especially in certain cases, after complete anesthesia of the nasal mucosa with cocaine.”
When Vincenzini faced trial in Parma that December, two brothers appeared at his side: Giulio Galeazzi, a lawyer, and Riccardo, the oculist. They tried to defend him before the medical board. Both were expelled from the hearing.
Riccardo would later deny any involvement with Asuero. Yet his presence at Vincenzini’s side, and his defense of questionable therapies, fed suspicions of charlatanism that followed him throughout his career.
Article from La Stampa reporting on the ties between brothers Giulio and Riccardo Galeazzi and physician Benedetto Vincenzini, during the disciplinary proceedings against him in Parma.