Giustiniano Lebano

Lebano derives from De lo Olevano or de lo Levano, an ancient noble Spanish family of the princes De los Garavitos. In 1146, they became consuls, and in 1222, they obtained the position, first in Milan and then in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, in Salerno. In 1464, the ambassador to the Aragonese court in Naples was Novello de lo Levano. After that, there are no notable records of the family for a couple of centuries, until May 4, 1743, when Andrea Lebano married Baroness Lucia Pinto of Lustra Cilento. From the marriage, Liborio Lebano was born, followed later by Filippo Lebano (1766–1832). Filippo married Maria Giuseppa Monaco, together they had Francesco (1801–1896) and Filippo (1802–1852), the latter of whom became a civil lawyer in 1826. == Biography ==

Son of lawyer Filippo (1802–1852), a member of the Cilento Carbonari, and Maria Acampora, he studied at the San Carlo alle Mortelle high school in Naples, graduating with a classical diploma in 1847. As a student of Basilio Puoti and Vito Fornari, he studied Literature and Italian, and became a deep scholar of dead languages such as Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, taught to him respectively by Nicola Lucignano, Giuseppe Maria Parascandolo, and Andrea Ferrigni. Along with other hermetists such as Giuseppe Ricciardi and Domenico Angherà, he revived the Hermetic tradition of Alexandrian Egyptian origin, giving rise to the Egyptian Grand Orient. As an esotericist, he was the mentor under Giuliano Kremmerz and studied under Eliphas Levi and was a member of the Theosophical Society. Risorgimento Being anti-Bourbon In Paris, he had the opportunity to meet the brothers Bédarride, Nicola Giuseppe Spedalieri, Charles Nodier, and Carlo Pisacane. Marriage with Virginia and private life Lebano married Virginia Bocchini on September 7, 1862, after meeting her in 1859. Virginia was the granddaughter of Domenico Bocchini, who had raised her after she became orphaned. In 1870, the couple moved to Villa Lebano, although Virginia was anxious due to the raids by the brigand Pilone. It was at this villa that two of their four children, a son and a daughter, died, leading Virginia to lose faith in conventional medicine. She began to seek out mediums and occultists, including Eusapia Palladino and Giuliano Kremmerz, and became involved in magic, Kabbalah, and spiritualism. However, in 1883, their fifteen-year-old son, Filippo, fell seriously ill. Desperate to save his life, Virginia consulted doctors, healers, monks, priests, exorcists, astrologers, and gurus. Admitted to the hospital in Torre Annunziata, all forms of infectious disease were ruled out, but the type of enteritis he was suffering from could not be identified. When Filippo was returned home, Virginia, completely discouraged, subjected him to a magical ritual, during which she was severely burned on September 30, 1883. From that point on, she lost her sanity and threatened suicide. Giustiniano Lebano withdrew from public life, practicing law from home. In 1884, their surviving daughter, Silvia, was sent to Sorrento for safety, while Virginia's health began to improve by 1885, so much so that she received a visit from Helena Blavatsky and Franz Hartmann, who came to be initiated into the Arcana Arcanorum by Giustiniano Lebano. After about three years, Virginia's condition worsened significantly, suffering from epileptic seizures, Alzheimer's, bipolar disorder, and Parkinson's disease. Under the care of her husband, she died in the summer of 1904. Lebano died in 1910. == The Lebano Fund ==

Thanks to his friendship with many men of letters, Lebano owned a private library consisting of 2,033 very rare manuscripts and over 5,000 rare volumes of Hermetic philosophy. Upon his death in 1910, the collection passed to his daughter, Silvia. With the advent of fascism, in 1925 Pasquale del Pezzo, duke, senator, university rector and former mayor of Naples, made all the works of the Neapolitan Masonic lodges disappear by hiding them in Villa Lebano, thanks to the help of a Navy Marshal, a certain Antonio Ariano. At the end of the Second World War, in 1948 Ariano brought all the documents back to Naples and, thanks to a previous agreement, took custody of a thousand manuscripts and 2,350 volumes from the library of Villa Lebano, handing them over to his wife, Rosaria Valerio di Caserta, an Egyptian theosophist and freemason, who kept them in her home in Caserta, Villa Valerio Landi, until 1975, the year of her death. Subsequently, a certain Nicola Ariano from Torre Annunziata, nephew of Antonio, began searching for the Lebano archive in both villas, but did not find any documents. == Works ==

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