UGONIO, POMPEO. - Priest, born in Rome around the middle of the 16th century, died there on 28 April 1614 and buried in the old sacristy of the Vatican Basilica.
He was a pupil of the Jesuits, then a benefited cleric of the Vatican Basilica before 1573 and a lecturer from 1587 at the Roman Archiginnasio. In 1588 he published in Rome the Historia delle Stationi di Roma che si celebrano la Quaresima, in which, besides the lives of the Saints to whose churches the stations belong, he treats of the origins, foundations, rites, restorations, relics and records of those churches, ancient and modern. In the preface to that work he mentions that from boyhood he had devoted himself to collecting records of the churches of Rome and to taking notes on them, as is shown by the manuscripts prepared for a Theatrum Romanae urbis. G. B. De Rossi recognized one of these as half preserved in cod. Vaticano Barb. lat. 1994 (foll. 1-692) and half in the Biblioteca comunale of Ferrara (cod. 1619, 1, 18, foll. 693-1400). In it there is much valuable information on the churches of Rome which was used by G. B. De Rossi, E. Müntz, A. Frothingham and G. Wilpert. Even more valuable are his manuscript notes, preserved in the Bibl. Vaticana, since his observations predate the transformations undergone by the sacred buildings of Rome from the close of the 16th century onward; also noteworthy is a copy of the Catalogo delle chiese di Roma by N. Signorili with annotations of a chronological and topographical character. Moreover, from the diary of P. U. it emerges that the initiative for the explorations of the ancient Christian cemeteries of Rome belongs to him, begun on 15 Nov. 1593 in the crypts of the Agro Verano together with the nineteen-year-old and youthful Antonio Bosio - his pupil at the Roman Archiginnasio. From these notes it emerges that P. U. and Antonio Bosio visited part of the cemeteries of S. Lorenzo, S. Sebastiano, Domitilla, Trasone, Priscilla, Panfilo, S. Valentino, copying inscriptions and roughly sketching the paintings.