CASIMIRO da ROMA. – Franciscan historian of the eighteenth century, who died in Rome on 17 April 1749. Neither his date of birth nor the Roman family to which he belonged is known. He donned the Franciscan habit in the Roman province of S. Maria in Aracoeli at the beginning of the eighteenth century, certainly before 1705, when we already find him a clerical student of belles-lettres in the convent of S. Francesco in Palombara.
In 1707 he was transferred to the convent of S. Maria in Aracoeli in Rome to complete his studies in philosophy and theology. In 1713 he was teaching letters in the convent of S. Francesco in Tivoli, and subsequently in that of S. Bartolomeo all'Isola in Rome, until in 1721 he began teaching theology at Aracoeli. In 1728 he left the chair in order to devote himself entirely to collecting and arranging the records of the church and convent of S. Maria in Aracoeli, as well as those of the other convents of the Roman province and of the monasteries of nuns subject to II. He spared no effort in his research, which he then arranged, with genuine acumen, in two quarto volumes: the first, Memorie istoriche della chiesa e del convento di S. Maria in Aracoeli di Roma, appeared in Rome in 1736, while C. was still alive; the other,
Memorie istoriche delle chiese e dei conventi dei Frati Minori della Provincia Romana, already prepared and approved for printing in 1741, was published by Nicola Borgiani only in 1754. C. had appended additions to both volumes on several occasions. Gregorio Giacomo Terribilini, in his Diario (cod. Vat. lat. 12.502, ff. 36-59), has shed light on the learned figure of C. The two works cited show him to have been a historian not unworthy of the age of the Maurists and Ludovico Antonio Muratori. That on Aracoeli should rightly be regarded as the first monograph on a church in Rome conceived in the modern sense; together, the two works constitute a mine of carefully verified information that today it is not always possible to find in their sources.