CARINI, ISIDORO. - Priest, paleographer and historian, b. in Palermo on 7 Jan. 1845, d. in Rome on 25 May 1895. Ordained in 1868, he set out with passion upon those paleographic and historical researches on Christianity, the papacy and Italy that characterized his work as an investigator and scholar. A participant in the founding of the Archivio storico siciliano and of the Società siciliana di storia patria (1872), he taught paleography and diplomatics at the State Archive of Palermo, gathered in Barcelona a good harvest of documents for the sixth centenary of the Vespers, and in 1885 was called to Rome by Leo XIII, who loved him greatly, subsequently becoming a canon of St. Peter's, under-archivist of the Holy See, consultor of the Cardinalatial Commission for Historical Studies, professor of paleography and diplomatics at the Vatican School and finally prefect of the Library, distinguishing himself through the significant discoveries made and disseminated from those inexhaustible holdings.
The friendship that the Pontiff had already nourished for C.'s father, General Giacinto Carini, and the good fortune of having been held at the baptismal font by Francesco Crispi, made him the spontaneous and natural intermediary of the contacts that Leo XIII maintained with the latter, when, beginning on 15 Dec. 1893, he returned to be president of the Council. It was thus that, through C., matters came to settle the bitter dispute over the granting of the exequatur to as many as 17 bishops, among them the one of Mantua, appointed patriarch of Venice, who was later to be Pius X; an apostolic prefecture was established at Keren, and in the very frequent visits made by Crispi to the Via Gregoriana where C. lived, there began in 1894 long negotiations for the famous attempt at a solution of the Roman Question. To C.'s sudden and untimely death there seem to have contributed not a little the very fierce attacks made against him by all those who, opposed to the work he was carrying on, wished to strike at him on the occasion of a theft of precious codices that had just then occurred in the Vatican Library. A member of numerous academies, a contributor to several newspapers and reviews, to C. are owed, among other things, the De rebus Regni Siciliae (Palermo 1882) and Gli architti e le biblioteche di Spagna in rapporto alla storia d'Italia in generale e della Sicilia in particolare (2 vols., ibid. 1884), as well as a volume on the Academy of Arcadia.
Bibliography8 works
Paolo Dalla Torre