PROFUMO, ATTILIO. - Archaeologist and historian, born in Genova in 1859, died in Roma in 1945.
He first studied architecture in Napoli; then, having moved to Roma, he devoted himself to historical studies. He was editorial secretary of the periodical Il Bessarione and took part, as deputy secretary, in the Second International Congress of Christian Archaeology in Roma in 1900. He was the author of the substantial volume Le fonti ed i tempi dell'incendio neroiano, Roma 1905; he was president of the Steering Committee of the periodical Studi romani, where he published Un battistero cristiano dell'anno 140 ca. (1 [1913], pp. 71-160), attempting to identify in the so-called Greek Chapel, in Priscilla, a Eucharistic hall to which neophytes baptized nearby would have been admitted. In the same periodical appeared Una nota alla lettera del 177 delle Chiese di Vienna e Lione (2 [1914], pp. 121-34) and the study La memoria monumentale « in catacumbas » degli apostoli Pietro e Paolo (2 [1914], pp. 415-70). In 1916 his study on La memoria di S. Pietro nella regione Salario-Nomentana appeared (in Römische Quartalschr., 21 Supplementheft, Roma 1916), with an analysis of the Passio Marcelli and the Gesta Liberii and the proposal to recognize a liturgical character in the cathedrae of the «coemeterium maius». He was a member of the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archaeology and of the Pontifical Roman Academy of Archaeology. Enrico Josi