ATTILIO PROFUMO. – Archaeologist and historian, b. Genoa 1859, d. Rome 1945.
He first studied architecture in Naples, then moved to Rome where he turned to historical studies. He served as editorial secretary of the periodical Il Besseriano and took part as assistant secretary at the Second International Congress of Christian Archaeology in Rome in 1900. He is the author of the extensive volume Le fonti ed i tempi dell’incendio neriano (Rome 1905). He was president of the steering committee of the periodical Studi romani, in which he published Un battistero cristiano dell’anno 140 a. (I 1913), pp. 71–160, attempting to identify in the so-called Greek Chapel in Priscilla a Eucharistic hall to which newly baptised neophytes would have been admitted nearby. In the same period he published Una nota alla lettera del 177 delle Chiese di Vienna e Lione (II 1914), pp. 121–34) and on La memoria monumentale e in catacumbas degli apostoli Pietro e Paolo (II 1914), pp. 415–70). In 1916 his study appeared on La memoria di S. Pietro nella ragione Salario-Nomentana (in Römische Quartalschrift, 21 Supplementheft, Rome 1916), with an analysis of the Passio Marcelli and the Gesta Liberii and the proposal to recognise in the seats of the “coemeterium maius” a liturgical character. He was a member of the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archaeology and of the Pontifical Roman Academy of Archaeology.