HOLSTE (HOLSTENIUS), LUKAS. — Geographer and scholar, born in Hamburg on 27 September 1596, died in Rome on 2 February 1661. He studied in Leiden with Johannes Meursius; he was in Denmark and England; in Paris he converted to Catholicism on 15 December 1624. In 1627 he moved to Rome, summoned by Cardinal Francesco Barberini, of whom he became librarian from 1636. In 1641 he was appointed custodian of the Vatican Library. He bequeathed his private collection of printed works to the Angelica Library in Rome; his manuscripts to others.
His various duties and boundless erudition prevented Holstenius from carrying out any of the grand projects he had planned, the principal one being a collection of the *Geographi graeci minores*. Posthumously published were his *Annotationes* to Filippo Cluverius’s *Antiquitates Italiae* (Rome 1666), as well as various patristic editions. He began the study for the revision of the forty geographical paintings in the Vatican Gallery. Of his many explorations in central and southern Italy, notebooks of notes remain.