TOLLI, FILIPPO. — Catholic organizer and one of the most distinguished opponents of slavery, born in Rome on 1 September 1843, died there on 17 May 1924.
In 1875 he obtained the chair of Italian at the Liceo dell'Apollinare, and in 1884 was appointed Writer in the Latin Section of the Vatican Library. Meanwhile, he also devoted himself to journalism, directing La Stella in Rome and, later, the combative La Frusta, while collaborating with the principal Catholic newspapers. In the Catholic movement he displayed a remarkable and multifaceted activity. He was president of the Circolo S. Pietro from 1874 to 1888, and also held the presidency of the Higher Council of the Società della Gioventù Cattolica from 1880 to 1889. When the CATTOLICITÀ (v.) was established, T. assumed the presidency of the regional committee of Lazio in 1893.
A member of the municipal and provincial councils of Rome, he served for fifteen years as vice-president of the Roman Electoral Union and promoted two congresses of Catholic municipal and provincial councillors: in Florence in 1907 and in Genoa in 1908. He was among the first to undertake initiatives for events of Catholic interest: the pontifical jubilee of Pius IX, the Vatican Exhibition of 1888, the jubilees of Leo XIII and Pius X, and the centenary celebrations of s. Filippo and Tasso. During the secular homage to Christ the Redeemer in 1900, he was president of the committee for monuments on Italy’s highest peaks. On the fiftieth anniversary of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception (1904), he was president of the Roman Commission, vice-president of the World Marian Congress, and directed two national pilgrimages to Lourdes, where he presented the bishop with the chapel erected by the Italians in the Basilica.
The work with which T.’s name principally remains associated is the movement against slavery, which he founded in Rome in 1888 together with the lawyer Simonetti. Through indefatigable propaganda, he brought together the few committees then existing in Italy and established others, thereby giving rise to the Società antischiavista italiana, of which he was elected general president in 1892. Re-elected without interruption, he held the office until his death. The foundation of such extensive activity was an exemplary life in the strictest Catholic sense, together with the piety and humility of a Franciscan Tertiary.