Through testimonials, archival material, photographs, archival videos, and scenic reconstructions, ENIGMA ROL is at the same time a portrait, an investigation, and an anthology of the character, personality, and works of the controversial psychic from Turin, Gustavo Adolfo Rol (1903-1994).
Gustavo Rol was born in the early 20th century into a high bourgeois family in Turin. Guided by the imposing, authoritarian, and highly critical figure of his father (one of the founders of Banca Commerciale Italiana), he embarked on a banking career, which he abandoned immediately after his father’s death. He began to dedicate himself, and continued to do so for the rest of his life, to his true interests: music, art, antiquities, and, above all, the “paranormal,” a term he vehemently repudiated. Gustavo Rol rejected every esoteric label. It was during a stay in France, when he was just twenty, that he realized he had “abilities,” as he called them. He could read deeply into people, grasp their essence, soul, thoughts, and sorrows. He sensed strong feelings that led him to diagnose illnesses and prevent disastrous events with unsettling precision. He often received his guests in his living room but also in other people’s homes, outdoors, in hotels, in casinos, in clinics, where he regularly visited the sick. He chose who could participate in his experimental evenings because, by his own admission, the phenomena he produced did not develop on command; the right atmosphere had to be created. This is one of the essential points fueling the controversies of those who never believed in him. Those who always saw in him only a skilled illusionist.
Gustavo Rol made many people partake in his wonders, and even today, they recount marvels and inexplicable phenomena. To shed light on this inexplicable yet fascinating and mysterious figure, terms like “paranormal,” “extrasensory,” or “parapsychological” are not sufficient. Throughout his life, he was much more. Some called him a “mediocre illusionist” (Piero Angela and other skeptics), while others said he was a top-tier illusionist (Francesco Maria Mugnai). And then there are direct witnesses who passionately and with firsthand knowledge claim that he was an unintentional spiritual master, an Enlightened being sent to Earth to make us better, or simply an extraordinary, special, unique man with mysterious and incredible abilities (Rol never referred to them as “powers”). He was encountered and appreciated by Charles De Gaulle, John F. Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, Franco Zeffirelli, Federico Fellini, Vittorio Valletta, Cesare Romiti, Gianni Agnelli, many members of the FIAT leadership, Sergio Rossi, Jean Cocteau, Adriana Asti, Valentina Cortese, Giorgio Strehler, Vittorio Gassman, Luciana Frassati Gawronska, and many other well-known and lesser-known figures, as well as a vast number of ordinary people.
