CARACCIOLO, ANTONIO. — Theatine historian, brother of St. FRANCIS CARACCIOLO, of the princes of Villa (di S. Maria) in Abruzzo, died at almost eighty years of age in the house of the Holy Apostles in Naples on 19 March 1642. In that same house he was admitted into the Order of the Theatines by St. ANDREW AVELLINO and professed in 1586. Eminent for learning and holiness of life, he held the offices of definitor general and counsellor to the Sacred Congregations of Rites and of the Index.
He is renowned as a prototypical Theatine historian, and his *Vita Cajetani Thieneae* (in *Acta SS. Augusti*, II, Paris 1867, pp. 282-324) was published together with the *Collectanea historica de vita Pauli IV* and the lives of the other two co-founders Boniface de’ Colli and Paul Consiglieri (Cologne 1612). Instead, the great life of Paul IV (*Vita e gesti di Giovanni Pietro Carafa, cioè di Paolo IV P. M.*) remained unpublished, though it circulated widely in manuscript (cf. Pastor, VI, p. 667 sqq.).
Published posthumously were the *De Sacris Ecclesiae Neapolitana monumentis* (Naples 1645), the *Nomenclator*, and the *Propylaea in quatuor chronologos* (Erchempert the Lombard, Lupus Protospatharius, the Anonymous of Cassino, Falco of Benevento) in L. A. Muratori, *RIS*, V, Milan 1724, p. 1 sqq. He also edited the *Vita s. Antonini abbatis*, patron of Sorrento, with *scholia*. Among his theological, liturgical and ascetical works are: *In Constitutiones Clericorum Regularium notae* (Rome 1610), which Cardinal P. de Bérulle had reprinted for the edification of the French clergy under the title *Synopsis veterum religiosorum rituum atque legum*, i.e. of ancient ecclesiastical discipline (Paris 1628).