ORSI, PAOLO. — Archaeologist, born in Rovereto on 18 October 1859 and died there on 8 November 1935. Professor at the Liceo-Ginnasio of Alatri, he later became deputy librarian at the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence.
From 1878 to 1889 his scholarly activity was devoted to the antiquities of Trentino; in 1888, in collaboration with F. Halbherr, he studied the cave of Zeus Ideos in Crete. In 1889 he was assigned to the Archaeological Museum of Syracuse, where he immediately began studies and research into the origins and development of Sicilian civilization and the relations between the Sicani and the Siculi, demonstrating that the former had come to the island from the sea, and the latter from the mainland. His first essays were the study of the Neolithic settlement of Stentinello (Bull.
di paletnologia, 1890) and those of the Sicilian necropolises of Melilli and Pammiro (ibid., 1891). His first major monograph was on the necropolis of Megara Hyblaea (Monum. Ant. dei Lincei, I, 1892).
His first systematic excavation campaign was the exploration of the necropolis of Fusco, near Syracuse (Not. Scavi, 1893). Among the countless studies produced by his remarkable activity in Sicily and Calabria, the following should be mentioned: the memoir on the Sicilian necropolises of Pantalica and Cassibile (Monum. Lincei, IX, 1899), the reports on the Archaic necropolis of Gela (Notizie Scavi, 1901; Monum. Lincei, XVII, 1906), the monograph on Locri Epizephiri (Boll. d'arte, 1909), and the monumental study of the Atheneion of Syracuse (Monum. Lincei, XXV, 1919). Moving down through the centuries, he did not refrain from exploring the recesses of the Christian cemetery galleries of Syracuse and illustrating them (Notizie Scavi, 1893-95; Röm. Quartalschrift, 1896). He also studied other Christian cemeteries in Sicily, some of them belonging to heretical sects (Röm. Quartalschrift, 1899); his studies in this field provided the basis for the work of J. Führer (v.). He published a Sicilian Christian miscellany in the Nuovo Bull. di Archeol. crist., 1903, and a Manipulus epigraphicus christianus in memory of G. B. De Rossi (in Memorie della Pont. accad. rom. di archeol., nuova serie, 1 [1923], pp. 113-22). He extended his investigations to the study of the Nilotic churches of S. Adriano at S. Demetrio Corone, the Patirion of Rossano (Boll. d'arte, 1921-23), and the Byzantine churches of Calabria in general (Collezione meridionale, 1928, p. 337, fig. 190); he personally supervised the restoration of the Cattolica of Stilo. He was a senator and a national member of the Accademia dei Lincei. A scholar of ready intuition, wide-ranging and profound erudition, and rigorous in his research methods, he left more than 400 writings, which taken together constitute a substantial individual contribution to the advancement of archaeological and historical disciplines.