Niccolò Alamanni was a Roman antiquary of Greek origin, born at
AnconaAncona is a city and a seaport in the Marche, a region of central Italy, population 101,909 . Ancona is situated on the Adriatic Sea and is the center of the province of Ancona and the capital of the region....
, 12 January 1583; died in
RomeRome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated municipality , with over 2.7 million residents in , while the population of the urban area is estimated by Eurostat to be 3.46 million. The metropolitan area of Rome is estimated by OECD to have a population of 3.7 million...
, 1626. He was educated in Rome at the Greek College, founded by Gregory XIII, but was ordained deacon and priest according to the Latin rite.
After teaching Greek for some time to persons of rank, he was appointed secretary to Cardinal Borghese, and afterwards made custodian of the
Vatican LibraryThe Vatican Library is the library of the Holy See, currently located in Vatican City. It is one of the oldest libraries in the world and contains one of the most significant collections of historical texts. Formally established in 1475, though in fact much older, it has 75,000 codices from...
.
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Niccolò Alamanni was a Roman antiquary of Greek origin, born at
AnconaAncona is a city and a seaport in the Marche, a region of central Italy, population 101,909 . Ancona is situated on the Adriatic Sea and is the center of the province of Ancona and the capital of the region....
, 12 January 1583; died in
RomeRome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated municipality , with over 2.7 million residents in , while the population of the urban area is estimated by Eurostat to be 3.46 million. The metropolitan area of Rome is estimated by OECD to have a population of 3.7 million...
, 1626. He was educated in Rome at the Greek College, founded by Gregory XIII, but was ordained deacon and priest according to the Latin rite.
After teaching Greek for some time to persons of rank, he was appointed secretary to Cardinal Borghese, and afterwards made custodian of the
Vatican LibraryThe Vatican Library is the library of the Holy See, currently located in Vatican City. It is one of the oldest libraries in the world and contains one of the most significant collections of historical texts. Formally established in 1475, though in fact much older, it has 75,000 codices from...
. His death is said to have been caused by too close attendance at the erection of the high altar of St. Peter's, to which honorable duty he had been assigned with orders to see that the sepulchres of the holy martyrs were not interfered with in the course of the work.
He wrote a
Syntagma de Lateranensibus parietibus (Rome, 1625) on the occasion of restorations carried out in the
church of St. John LateranThe Basilica of St. John Lateran is the cathedral of the Church of Rome, Italy, and the official ecclesiastical seat of the Bishop of Rome, who is the Pope...
by his patron, Cardinal Borghese; also a dissertation on the relative importance of the right and left side as exhibited in certain old papal coins that place St. Paul to the right of St. Peter,
De dextrae laevaeque manus praerogativa ex antiquis Pontificum nummis Paulum Petro apostolo anteponentibus. He is known in the history of classical literature as the editor (Lyon, 1623) of the famous
Anecdota, or
Secret History, of
ProcopiusProcopius of Caesarea was a prominent Byzantine scholar from Palestine. Accompanying the general Belisarius in the wars of the Emperor Justinian I, he became the principal historian of the 6th century, writing the Wars of Justinian, the Buildings of Justinian and the celebrated Secret History...
, a work that was violently criticized outside of Italy.