PALMIERI, AURELIO. – Italian Orientalist, born in Savona on 4 May 1870, died in Rome on 18 October 1926. He first belonged to the Order of the Hermits of St. Augustine (1885), from which he passed in 1890 to the Congregation of the Augustinians of the Assumption, returning from there in 1902 to the Hermits. Excesses of style and erroneous concepts expressed in his works, together with conduct that was not always praiseworthy, brought him serious difficulties, which ultimately reduced him to the lay state. He spent the final years of his life in Rome, as director of the Institute for Eastern Europe.
The list of his publications comprises 15 works and approximately 270 articles in the DThC and in numerous Italian and foreign journals, chiefly in the Bessarione, where no fewer than 130 of his articles appeared between 1896 and 1925. Among his works on the Christian East, the following should be mentioned: Die Polemik des Islam (Salzburg 1902); Dositeo Patriarca greco di Gerusalemme (Florence 1908); La Chiesa russa (there 1908); Il progresso dommatico nel concetto cattolico (there 1910); Nomenclator litterarius theologiae orthodoxae Russicae et Graecae recentioris (2 vols., Prague 1910); Theologia dogmatica orthodoxa (Ecclesiae-Graeco-Russicae) ad lumen catholicae doctrinae examinata et discussa (I, Florence 1911; II, there 1913). These last two works remained incomplete. His final books are devoted to contemporary Russia: La politica asiatica dei bolcevichi (Bologna 1924); La geografia politica della Russia sovietica (Rome 1926).