PANTALEONI, DIOMEDE. - Senator, born at Macerata on 21 March 1810, died there on 3 May 1885. A physician of great renown, he also carried on notable political activity and in 1848 was deputy for Cingoli in the Roman Parliament, where he sat on the right, opposing the excesses of the extreme party.
After the fall of the Roman Republic, he worked to ensure that the papal restoration should continue along the path of constitutional reforms. He therefore shared the ideas of Minghetti and Pasolini and, with them, eventually adhered to the policy of Count di Cavour. In 1861 the latter entrusted him with supporting the well-known mission of p. Passaglia, intended to obtain from Pio IX the peaceful renunciation of temporal power. The attempt naturally achieved no result, and P., invited to leave Rome, withdrew to Paris, whence he continued, especially through an extensive correspondence with the representatives of the moderate party, his efforts for a diplomatic solution to the Roman Question: P.’s entire correspondence is preserved, still unpublished, in the Civic Library of Macerata. Its publication would make it possible to know better the action that he “exercised on a fairly broad scale in 1860–61, and in a more limited manner in the following years, during which he always maintained considerable political activity, both as a private individual and as a member of the Senate, 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 aroused extensive discussion.