GIOSEPPE ALLEGRANZA. — Learned Dominican archaeologist, born in Milan in 1713, died in Rome in 1786. He made many educational journeys throughout Italy and also in southern France, forming friendships with many scholars. He made Milan his habitual residence; Maria Theresa awarded him a gold medal for merit in 1775.
He was a man of great ideals (he even planned a kind of universal library, the Pansophia), a prolific writer, though only of pamphlets and small works. He illustrated almost all the Christian antiquities of Lombardy and some Sicilian ones. The principal ones are: *Spiegazioni e riflessioni sopra alcuni sacri monumenti antichi di Milano*, Milan 1757 (eight dissertations of a particularly symbolographic character) and *De sepulcri christianis in aedibus sacris*, Milan 1773, in defense of that custom against an ordinance of the Austrian government.