PANTALEONI, DIOMEDE. - Senator, b. at Macerata on 21 March 1810, d. there on 3 May 1885. A physician of great renown, he also engaged in considerable political activity, and in 1848 he was deputy for Cingoli in the Roman Parliament, where he sat on the right, opposing the excesses of the extreme wing.
After the fall of the Roman Republic, he worked to ensure that the pontifical restoration would continue along the path of constitutional reforms. He therefore shared the ideas of Minghetti and Pasolini and, with them, eventually came to support the policy of Count Cavour. The latter, in 1861, charged him with supporting the well-known mission of Fr. Passaglia, aimed at obtaining from Pius IX a peaceful renunciation of temporal power. The attempt naturally came to nothing, and P., invited to leave Rome, withdrew to Paris, whence he continued his efforts toward a diplomatic solution of the Roman Question, especially through an intense correspondence with the exponents of the moderate party: the entire epistolary collection of P. is preserved, still unpublished, in the Biblioteca civica of Macerata. Its publication would make it possible to understand better the action that he «exercised with a certain breadth in 1860-61, and more limitedly in the following years, during which he always maintained considerable political activity, both as a private individual and as a member of the Senate, into which he entered on 6 Nov. 1873». A year before his death he published a volume on L'idea italiana nella soppressione del potere temporale dei papi (Turin 1884), which stirred wide discussion.
Bibliography
Renzo U. Montini