3-077-998 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Signor Succi, the Fasting Man, 1890. 'At three o'clock in the afternoon of Saturday, April 26, the term of forty days which Signor Succi was to endure without eating any food came to its end, having begun at that hour of the day on March 17. The sequestered and canopied space in the Royal Aquarium at Westminster...has been daily visited by numbers of people, willing to pay an extra fee, and their curiosity has been gratified by seeing an Italian gentleman, of sallow complexion and evidently, though muscular, without an ounce of spare flesh, neatly dressed and seeming quite at his ease, sitting at a small table raised upon a platform...He invented an elixir, distilled from herbs, of which he is allowed to take twenty or thirty drops every day in his fasting trials, as it contains no nutritive matter...The close confinement, day and night, to a gas-lighted, ill-ventilated apartment might have been expected to injure his health; but we do not hear that it is so. He has lost weight 30 lb. 14 oz...Signor Succi is a smoker, and is permitted to solace himself with a pipe or cigar whenever he pleases...He talks little, but reads the newspapers, and writes autographs for sale with copies of his portrait'. From "Illustrated London News", 1890.