New book is out!

Finally my latest book is here:
An Archaeologist in Rome at the Service of the Order: Letters from the Hospitaller Grand Master to Antonio Bosio (1604–1629), Routledge: New York and London, 2025.

I wrote my doctoral thesis, about ten years ago now, on Antonio Bosio, a seventeenth-century archaeologist and scholar who, the illegitimate son of a knight, was brought as a child from Malta to Rome and spent his entire life discovering and exploring the catacombs of Rome. The studies on Bosio, and all those that came in connection, have been the important basis on which I built my researcher portfolio and led me to my current job, which I truly love.

At the time when I finally published -in June 2020- the volume based on my doctoral thesis (Antonio Bosio e i primi collezionisti di antichità Cristiane, Piac: Vatican City, 2020), I did not really think it would end there. In fact, when in February 2022 I signed the contract with Routledge for the publication of the Grand Master’s letters to Antonio Bosio, it seemed to me that I was doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing: picking up the theme again but focusing on Antonio’s political life, on his work for the Order of Malta and, at the same time, working on unpublished materials preserved in my place of the heart: the National Library of Malta.

Brief description of the book

This volume is part of “The Military Orders Project” series and provides the original texts of the Grand Masters’ letters to Antonio Bosio in Rome, preserved in the National Library of Malta, together with a biographical study on Antonio Bosio, carried out over the years and now expanded with new information and research.

The volume opens with a historical presentation of the Bosio family within the Order of Malta. This is followed by a complete biographical profile of Antonio Bosio, compiled from the Order’s official sources and from archive documents found in various locations.

A short chapter is then dedicated to the presentation of the various archive collections in which Antonio Bosio’s private documents and autograph manuscripts are found, to offer a complete panorama of Bosio’s figure, although I focussed more on the biographical aspects inherent to the Order and his work at its service.

The core of the volume is obviously the letters of the Grand Masters to Bosio from 1604 to the time of his premature death in September 1629. The letters are presented in a simple transcription of their original form, and then their translation into English.

I believe that the task of this book is to offer a set of sources that will be useful to scholars on the international scene for years to come. The aim is to make public as widely as possible material that is not widely accessible, both in geographical (because it is preserved in Malta and so far not public in digital form) and linguistic terms (with these being handwritten in seventeenth-century Italian).

A general, critical reflection on the letters and the role of the Order’s Agent in the early seventeenth century is then proposed in the final two chapters. Here, the texts and their recurring questions are taken as a starting point for further comments, but above all to present the role and prerogatives of the Agent of the Sacred Religion on the basis of what is revealed in the Bosio epistolary.