The material consists of three elements, which are best considered separately.

1. The first element is the envelope, on which Paolo Vagheggi’s address was assembled using letters cut out from printed material. This detail immediately recalls the envelope sent three years earlier to Silvia Della Monica, which had likewise been made using cut-out letters. The similarity is particularly significant because, in November 1988, the details concerning the Della Monica letter had not yet been made public. For this very reason, several researchers and enthusiasts of the case consider it plausible that the letter sent to Vagheggi may also genuinely be attributable to the Monster of Florence, although this attribution has never been officially recognized.

Left: the envelope addressed to Silvia Della Monica; right: the envelope addressed to Paolo Vagheggi.

Detail of the word “Firenze,” comparing the letters “REN,” which show the same inclination and proportions on both envelopes.

• Inside the envelope were two separate documents. The first is a card bearing what appears to be a small ephemeris table: a series of numbers and years accompanied by zodiac symbols, arranged under five columns. The headings represent, in order, the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, and Mars. The positions of the planets within the zodiac signs correspond, with a few anomalies that we will examine, to the dates of the murders attributed to the Monster of Florence.

Left: the original letter with the list of murders linked to the ephemerides; right: the same image enhanced with Photoshop and AI to improve readability.

• The second document is a separate sheet bearing a diagram made up of lines resembling those of the palm of a right hand. At the intersections of these lines are points associated with the locations of the double murders. On the same sheet, the inscription “dx hand” (“right hand”) was also identified, formed by a sequence of 96 dots. 

Diagram resembling the lines of a right palm, with points corresponding to the locations of the double murders.

It is above all the card containing the astronomical table that I would like to analyze in this thread, and this is where I would really appreciate your help.

I am convinced that this document may contain a hidden message, a word, or a short meaningful phrase, and I do not believe that the table was created solely to represent the astrological positions corresponding to the dates of the murders.

Personally, I believe I may have identified at least one possible key to interpreting the right-hand side of the table, the part made up of the five planets and their corresponding zodiac signs. However, I would prefer to share my interpretation at a later stage, so as not to influence your observations from the outset.

For now, I would simply like to open this thread, present the material, and gather independent impressions, hypotheses, and possible interpretations.

As the discussion develops, I will gradually share my own thoughts and my interpretation of the work I have already done, explaining step by step the method I followed and the elements that led me to the various hypotheses.

If this table really does conceal a message, where would you look first?

Thank you for the time you’ll dedicate to this challenge!

Photo source: www.mostrodifirenze.com

Ciao, @lendor-77.

So, once again you draw me in with your puzzles!

This is not something I’ve seen before so, following your hint, I am choosing to see it initially only for what it appears to be at first glance. I am deliberately avoiding doing any research into what must have been written about it already.

Across the top of the ‘table’ we can clearly identify the astronomical symbols for the Sun (☉), Moon (☽), Mercury (☿), Venus (♀) and Mars (♂) and in the left-hand column we predominantly have groups of four separated numbers, the last in each group clearly intending to represent years.

Of the initial three in each group it is notable that the first contains no value greater than 23, whilst the remaining two do not exceed 59 which, taken together and given the context, suggests that these are Right Ascension (RA) coordinates, most probably for the Sun in the next column. I might then expect the remaining entries, being clear zodiacal sign symbols, to record the astrological constellation in which the respective celestial bodies are found when the Sun is at the given RA in the given year.

The incomplete line at the bottom, together with the early ‘ME 72 may’ row, don’t immediately convey to me any obvious interpretation.

The first thing that stands out from this is that the RAs are extraordinarily precise, so much so that, for each respective year, it will be possible to equate them to not only a given date but even a time, right down to the minute. To deduce these dates and times we have to first convert the Right Ascensions to ecliptic longitude and, for this, we will need to fix the degree of precession through choosing a plausible epoch, which I would initially select as B1950.0. The celestial longitudes of the Sun in the respective years would then allow us to deduce our dates/times, and these can be summarised in the table below.

Again, being not very familiar with the precise details of the case, I could only assume, but would need to verify, that these are dates of the canonical Il Mostro killings?

To test the solar RA interpretation against the first column of the original table, we can use the given RAs to determine what astrological boundary should contain the Sun on the associated dates. We get:

and we can immediately see that there seems to be some problem with the second entry for 1981, since the source puts the Sun in Libra, whilst the calculation using the RA as given has it one sign over in Scorpio.

If, for the sake of analysis, we were to turn this problem around and start with the known and/or estimated times of the canonical murders, we would reconstruct this table ourselves as below:

† Representative time used where the precise time of death is not securely fixed.

As we can see, this introduces non-trivial shifts in the first column RA values, but it nonetheless does line up all but two of the sign associations in the last five columns. Moreover, the two mismatches here both relate to the Moon, the celestial body with the fastest apparent ecliptic motion, and have it merely one sign over. This then means that even a modest adjustment to the time of event would bring all the signs into one accord.

One of the mismatches just happens to be the one sign that is given emphasis through the addition of a bounding square, although what the specific intention is in this remains unknown.

Just two observations that might be useful for your analysis.

The first concerns 1985. The exact date of the last double murder is not certain, so I would avoid treating September 8 as a fixed datum. For the purposes of this analysis, I think it would be safer either to exclude 1985 from the more precise comparisons, or simply to consider the whole weekend of September 6–8, 1985 as the possible time window.

The second is that I, and especially others before me, had independently checked the planetary positions using ephemerides and found the same two discrepancies involving the Moon that you identified.

They concern the second 1981 entry, i.e. the October 22, 1981 murder, and the 1983 entry.

I find your interpretation of the first three numbers as Right Ascension very interesting. In particular, in the second 1981 entry, the RA 14h 05m 34s would already place the Sun in Scorpio, whereas in the original table the Sun is still shown in Libra. Libra, however, is consistent with the actual date of the murder, October 22. This therefore seems to create an internal discrepancy between the Sun’s position implied by the RA and the zodiac sign shown in the table.

Whenever you want, I can also share a few little “gems” I have found while working on this letter. For the moment, though, I would rather not do that straight away, because I am very interested to see whether, by working on it completely independently, you or others here might arrive at something new without being influenced by my observations.

What is interesting is that, if we attempt to build up the five sign columns from the Right Ascensions as given, we get 5 erroneous entries out of 40. However, when we deduce the RAs for ourselves from the event dates, as far as we are able to pin these down, we are left with only these two lunar errors, the first of which (October, 1981) has the Moon sufficiently close to the transition border that setting the time back by a mere six and a half hours would bring it back from Virgo into Leo whilst leaving the other four columns unchanged.

The situation is different for the September 1983 lunar anomaly. Here, we can bring the Moon back from Libra into Virgo, again without any disturbance to the other columns. However, the time adjustment required in this case would need to be of the order of 45 hours, or nearly two full days and nights.

The next notable point is then that just this very lunar sign entry in the original artefact table is emphasised with a bounding square and the corresponding RA underlined. So, perhaps there is already some late acknowledgement here that Virgo was actually in error or that some error in the canonical dating was being implied.

Overall, though, it seems evident upon deeper analysis that the construction of the columns giving the signs is methodologically achievable by starting with the actual event dates and times and proceeding from there. The column of right ascensions, however, do not show the same starting points, except in one isolated case, with the values corresponding to dates and times sometimes days rather than just hours out. This, then, presents to us some fundamental mismatch between the two data blocks and how they were generated.

The one standout exception is the Vicchio murders of Pia Rontini and Claudio Stefanacci in July of 1984. The artefact gives the solar RA as 8h 34m 59s which, when converted to the precise date and time gives 29 July 1984, 21:45 CEST. Witnesses reported hearing gun shots at 21:45 local time that evening.

I find the distinction you are making between the two blocks of the table very interesting: the zodiac-sign block seems to have been constructed from the actual dates of the murders, whereas the RA block appears to contain different values which, in most cases, do not correspond exactly to the time of the event.

This distinction interests me in particular because, while I have arrived at an interpretation of the right-hand side of the table that I personally find quite convincing, I still do not have an equally satisfactory explanation for the numerical block on the left.

There is one thing I would like to ask you, though. In the course of your checks, you keep coming across small discrepancies, inconsistencies, or values that do not match perfectly. Looking at the overall picture, do you think these are more likely to be simple calculation or transcription errors, or does it seem possible to you that at least some of them were introduced deliberately? 😀 

I have studied very closely the right ascensions in the first column and, in particular, the spread of how far these deviate from what you would calculate independently from the event dates/times. They are close enough that we can be sure that they are in some degree intended to be RAs for the Sun around the times of the murders, but there is nothing consistent in how they were produced that points to any specific mode of error production such as rounding errors, errors of conversion from RA to ecliptic longitude, even rounding to a specific epoch such as midnight or noon on the days in question. For this reason, I would be unable to form any suspicion of intentional ‘errors’ in relation to this column without further understanding what was actually being documented here.

That said, the October 1981 RA is clearly an anomaly and it is just possible that here the compiler mistakenly used the mean rather than the apparent Sun. Yet since the two data blocks are found to have been in some degree independently constructed, this one error doesn’t perpetuate beyond its transcription here.

From what you’ve hinted at, however, I’m wondering if I should be looking less at the numbers column and more at the grid of signs? 🤔🤓

Let me give you a little tidbit now, even though it’s not directly related to the analysis you’re doing: what does that “ME 72” remind you of?