TOLLI, FILIPPO. - Catholic organizer, one of the most deserving anti-slavery campaigners, b. in Rome on 1 Sept. 1843, d. there on 17 May 1924.
In 1875 he held the chair of Italian at the Liceo dell'Apollinare, and in '84 he was appointed Scrittore of the Latin Section of the Vatican Library. Meanwhile he also devoted himself to journalism, editing La Stella in Rome and later the combative La Frusta, and contributing to the leading Catholic daily newspapers. In the Catholic movement he carried on a remarkable and many-sided activity. He was president of the Circolo S. Pietro from '74 to '88, and he also held the presidency of the Consiglio superiore of the Società della Gioventù Cattolica from 1880 to 1889. After the Opera dei Congressi e Comitati Cattolici (v.) arose, in 1893 T. assumed the presidency of the regional Committee of Lazio.
A member of the municipal and provincial Council of Rome, for fifteen years he held the vice-presidency of the Unione elettorale romana and promoted two Congresses of Catholic municipal and provincial councillors: in 1907 at Florence, in 1908 at Genoa. He was among the first in initiatives for events of Catholic interest: the pontifical jubilee of Pius IX, the Vatican Exposition of 1888, the jubilees of Leo XIII and of Pius X, the centenary commemorations of St. Philip and of Tasso. In the secular homage of 1900 to Christ the Redeemer, he was president of the Committee for the monuments on the major peaks of Italy. At 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 he directed two national pilgrimages to Lourdes, where he made the handing over, to the bishop, of the chapel erected by the Italians in the Basilica.
The work to which the name of T. is chiefly linked is the anti-slavery movement, which he founded in Rome in 1888 in union with the lawyer Simonetti. With tireless propaganda he gathered together the few committees that existed in Italy and constituted others, 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 basis of so vast an activity was a life exemplary in the strictest Catholic sense and the piety and humility of a Franciscan Tertiary.