FABRETTI, RAFFAELE. — Archaeologist, born at Urbino in 1618, died at Rome on 7 January 1700, canon of S. Lorenzo in Damaso and subsequently of S. Pietro in Vaticano. Although he held various offices from the Holy See, such as that of conducting diplomatic negotiations with Spain and later with Urbino, as well as composing apostolic briefs, he always found time to devote himself to his preferred studies and to collect and copy ancient inscriptions, of which he assembled a noteworthy collection in his paternal home, encouraged above all by the example of his friend Lucio Giovanni di Traù, who had already brought together a considerable number of ancient inscriptions from Dalmatia.
F., appointed “Custodian of Relics and Cemeteries,” had no difficulty obtaining cemetery inscriptions, since Cardinal Carpegna gave him permission to take from the catacombs all the inscriptions he desired; others were subsequently ceded to him by Prince Giustiniani of Bassano and by the dukes Cesarino Sforza and Alessandro Mattei. To illustrate this collection, F. published at Rome in 1699: Inscriptionum antiquorum quae in aedibus peternis asservantur explicatio et additimentum; it had a second edition in 1702. Of the ten chapters of which it is composed, the whole of the eighth and part of the tenth contain Christian epigraphs: many of these were copied in the cemetery discovered in 1687 at the first mile on the Via Latina, which F. believed to be that of Tertullian. F. also published a small plan of this cemetery.
His other publications include: De aquis et aqueductis veteris Romae dissertationes tres (Rome 1826), and those, in-fol., on Trajan’s Column, the “tabula illaca,” and the Claudian emissary of Lake Fucinus: De columna Traiana syntagma: accesserunt explicatio veteris tabellae anaglyphae Homeri Iliadem atque ex Strychcero, Arctino et Lasche Illi excidium continentis et emissarii lacus Fucini descriptio (ibid. 1863). Also noteworthy is the Dissertazione in cui si emendano alcuni errori seguiti nella descrizione del Lazio antico fatta da p. d'innario Kircher, which was included in volume III of the Dissertazioni dell'Accademia Etrusca di Cortona.