Bartolomeo Borghesi

Who is Bartolomeo Borghesi?

Bartolomeo Borghesi was an Italian antiquarian and epigrapher widely regarded as one of the founders of modern numismatics, who spent the final forty years of his life as an adopted resident of San Marino. Born in Savignano, near Rimini, he studied in Bologna and Rome, where he catalogued major coin collections, including work undertaken for Pope Pius VII on the Vatican's holdings. After the political disturbances of 1821 in the Papal States, Borghesi withdrew to the safety and neutrality of San Marino, where he settled permanently and, despite his relatively modest formal role as podestà of the small republic, turned the tiny mountaintop state into an unlikely center of European classical scholarship. Working largely through extensive correspondence with scholars across the continent, he produced his monumental Nuovi Frammenti dei Fasti Consolari Capitolini (1818–1820), which established reliable chronological foundations for Roman history, and conceived the plan for a comprehensive collection of all Latin inscriptions of the Roman world. That project was later carried forward by the Academy of Berlin under Theodor Mommsen and became the celebrated Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum. Napoleon III personally ordered the publication of Borghesi's complete works, eventually issued in ten volumes between 1862 and 1897. Borghesi died in San Marino in 1860, and the republic still honors him with a monument and a commemorative coin issued in 2004.

Sources: Wikipedia, "Bartolomeo Borghesi" (accessed 2026) · Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Bartolomeo Borghesi, San Marinese statesman" · Rutgers Database of Classical Scholars, "Borghesi, Bartolomeo"