Where in Malta was Antonio Bosio’s birthplace?

Maltese historians assert he was born in Vittoriosa. Giovanni Curmi, one of the first to attempt to tackle Bosio’s biography seriously, adds emphatically: “We have his act of birth registered in one of our cities, Vittoriosa ... he was born of a Maltese woman from Vittoriosa”, but then fails to quote any further detail in support.

Maltese authors revel in unreliable claims. One claims that Fra Dr Joseph Zammit, the chaplain-surgeon of the knights of Malta “had on various occasions showed Count Ciantar the exact house in Vittoriosa where Antonio Bosio was born and whose mother was well known to him”.

The native writers have one thing in common: they all fail to acknowledge the elephant in the drawing room – in this case a son born of a father who was bound by religious vows and a mother who was a North African slave or servant.

With the generous help of Dr Simon Mercieca and of Vanessa Borg’s invaluable research, I embarked on a quest for this birth (or baptism) certificate and came to very disappointing conclusions.

The truth must be that Dr Curmi never saw any birth registration relating to Bosio, and would have relied on unreliable hearsay.

Dr Mercieca’s and mine turned into a wild goose chase after an inexistent duck.

Looking for the birth document of an illegitimate son or daughter in the cinquecento parish registers can be a very daunting task, unless one already has some very precise leads to start from. In Antonio Bosio’s case, we only have a vague date and his father’s name – which is not very helpful as, by law, a knight could not acknowledge illegitimate offspring at birth.

If the mother was married, her illegitimate child would be registered routinely in her husband’s name. If she was single, then the son would be registered as illegitimate, and would take its mother’s name.

The Vittoriosa parish registers did not yield any entry in 1575 and 1576 that could be construed with any degree of certainty as referring to Antonio Bosio.

All the other entries of out-of-wedlock births present problems too. Not one obviously belongs to our Antonio Bosio. The only candidates among the illegitimate births could be: Antonio son of Elisabetta daughter of the Rhodiot Carro, born in Gudja on February 2, 1575; Giovanni Antonio son of Cornelia, registered in Porto Salvo, Valletta on February 20, 1576; Giovanni Antonio, son of Agnesa, registered in Vittoriosa on January 12, 1577; Antonio, son of Giovanna the Greek, registered in Porto Salvo on June 15, 1577; Antonio Maria, both parents’ names unknown (a foundling?) registered in Porto Salvo, Valletta on February 3, 1578.

Very coincidentally, part of the later fame of the archaeologist Antonio Bosio rests on his studies of the catacomb of the Via Cornelia and that of Sant’Agnesa.

I would not care to narrow down the list any further. If anything, those in which the child is named Giovanni Antonio would appear marginally the more plausible candidates, the Giovanni recalling the father’s name Giovanni Otto, and linking the child to the Order of St John. But this, admittedly, is pure speculation.

Twelve-year-old Antonio was taken to Rome – at his own insistence, the more romantic biographers add. The adolescent then became part of the Bosio family, with Giacomo his uncle taking responsibility for him, “adopting” him as his own.

This would mean Antonio lived his early life in Malta. His mother, the ancilla Afra, fades almost completely from the scene, and all we know about her is that she lived out the rest of her life in Malta where she died. Was Antonio brought up by her during the early Maltese years of his life?

Giannotto’s career in the Order flourished after his reinstatement. The historian described him as “adorned by fine literary skills, and very expert in the laws”. Appointed Vice-Chancellor of the Order, notwithstanding the great opposition of knights from Castile who claimed that office belonged to their langue, he delegated the day-to-day running of the Chancery to his lieutenant Fra Emanuel de Quevedo, (Chebedo) who let it go to wreck and ruin, while Giannotto lived in Rome.

When, in 1608, the Pope summoned de Quevedo to Rome to face some unspecified criminal charges, Giannotto returned to Malta to resume his duties, but he renounced his office in 1617 when he was promoted Bali of Pavia, not without an opposition by other Italian knights so scandalous and intemperate that they had to be severely disciplined.

Antonio’s uncle Giacomo doted on his nephew. The old man’s wistful testament (he died of a catarrh infection when 83 years old) makes this very clear and is I believe well worth quoting. As universal heir he named Antonio “my nephew and pupil, whom I adopted and am hereby adopting as my own most beloved son, begging him to forgive me if my estate is a poor and encumbered one and if I cannot give him more. Gold and silver were not for me, but all I have I give to you, and remember, son, that we lived a life of poverty, but we are very rich if we have the fear of God”.

Giacomo the historian also recalled his brother Giannotto in the will – again a touching, naive entry: “I leave him the dearest and most precious treasure I have in this world: the small gold cross I always hang round my neck, which contains a fragment of the true Holy Cross and some hairs of the Virgin Mary and other holy relics, together with the ring with the large turquoise stone which I had bought from the estate of the Pope Innocent VIII, asking him to wear it for the love he bears me, keeping in mind the virtues of turquoise stones when they are given as presents.”

It was Bosio who turned underground curiosity and inquisitiveness into a precise, verifiable discipline

Antonio’s father’s wayward genes not surprisingly staged an appearance during his adolescence. His earliest biographer very likely knew Antonio personally and painted a disturbing picture of the young rascal sowing his wild oats in Rome. The poet Gian Vittorio Rossi, who wrote under the penname Giano Nicio Eritreo, in 1643-48 published three volumes of biographies of leading intellectuals in Latin, and included Antonio Bosio. Rossi happened to be a close friend of Fabio Chigi, Inquisitor of Malta and later Pope Alexander VII.

After describing Antonio as short like his father and purple-lipped like his mother, Eritreo rips in: “He frequented dissolute, whoring friends... in nocturnal tavern-crawls, late-nights out, in dinners and parties there was no one who surpassed his pranks, his boisterous laughter and tomfoolery. But when the right time came, no one then surpassed him in wisdom, diligence and industry.”

So let’s come to Antonio’s wisdom, diligence and industry. Today Bosio is remembered chiefly for two major achievements.

The first is so universally known and acknowledged that I will deal with it only very briefly: Bosio’s putting archaeology, especially early Christian underground studies, on a solid scientific basis. ­

Before him, various other scholars had shown an interest in rediscovering the past, but it was Bosio who turned underground curiosity and inquisitiveness into a precise, verifiable discipline.

While formally studying law and even practising as a lawyer representing the Order of Malta in its (frequent) litigation in the Roman tribunals, Antonio Bosio discovered a consuming passion for anything that witnessed early Christianity. He started exploring systematically and manically each and every known underground cemetery in Rome, Christian and Hebrew, and then went on to discover, survey and record new ones.

He kept meticulous notes of his findings and commissioned painters to transcribe graphically his discoveries and observations. He accumulated a huge corpus of notes, which he intended to turn into a comprehensive manual of early Christian archaeology. He turned amateur archaeology “into a veritable science”.

In parallel with his hands-on explorations, Antonio started tracing, reading, copying and digesting every scrap of early Christian literature he could lay his hands on, the writings of the holy fathers, Church documents, inscriptions – anything in fact the ancient archives had preserved. This gave him the right historical background and perspective to enable him to place in context the huge amount of material evidence his explorations and excavations had been yielding. His turned into a devouring passion that took up many long years of his activities.

All this is recorded in any biographical study of the life of Antonio Bosio: his compulsive quest for any and all the evidence of early Christianity. Less known is an episode recounted by his servant, Lillo, the bandit on the run whom we have already met: “When I lived in his house, he had started working on that beautiful book he wrote on underground Rome, and I often went with him to explore the hollows of that city for the most ancient evidence, and always meeting with some misadventure or other. And once, having lost our bearings in relation to the entrance, we remained trapped there for two days, without knowing, nor having hope in finding, where the entrance was. We were recommending ourselves to the Lord, waiting to die when, coming across a crevice, we started calling in a loud voice; fortunately for us we were heard by a countryman who was passing by, and, with his help, we were freed from that dungeon.”

Antonio Bosio only lived for the completion of his magnum opus, but he died before he had it ready for publication. The author had first started to write the text in Latin, but eventually switched to Italian. He willed all his estate to the Order of Malta, including his unfinished manuscript.

Some of the Roman intellectuals who knew about this work in progress were enlightened enough to press Grand Master Antoine de Paule to proceed with its publication, and the Order agreed to sponsor its production and distribution.

Though the frontispiece bears the date 1632, the printing only finished long after, when Bosio had been dead five years.

Bosio’s sumptuous Roma Sotterranea took the academic world by storm. Some reprints and translations followed. Catholic scholarship generally praised Bosio’s lifetime endeavour, but Protestant exegists found plenty in it to disagree with – the interpretations rather than the methodology. All in all, no one denied the book was a formidable tour de force masterminded by one solitary intellect. It laid the foundations of modern archaeology, in which the finding of ancient objects for collectors became secondary to what those objects and their context could reveal about the past.

Antonio Bosio was, not unfairly, nicknamed the Christopher Columbus of the catacombs.

The Bosio uncle and nephew are responsible for two of the heftiest works which have an undeniable Malta connection. Girolamo’s Istoria, in three huge interminable volumes, proves particularly heavy to read, being written in the most convoluted, reader-unfriendly Italian – dull and boring, in other words.

I dare anyone to try to wade through more than 10 pages at a go without reaching out for a double espresso.

In Malta we call ‘bosju’ anyone gloomy, depressive, who refuses to participate in communal fun. Prof. Aquilina believes bosju derives from bozzu – petulant, querulous, hard to please – but I have my uninformed doubts ...

There is another achievement of Antonio Bosio he is very rarely credited with. His exploration and excavations of the Roman catacombs, the publicising of his discoveries gave more impetus throughout Europe to the craze for the relics of Roman martyrs.

Bosio – and others – assumed that the catacombs were actually underground cities inhabited by early Christians in search of safety from persecution, and that all the skeletons found in them were those of the followers of Christ who had suffered martyrdom at the hands of the pagan Romans. And there were thousands of them lying idle in the40 Roman cemeteries then known.

We were recommending ourselves to the Lord, waiting to die when, coming across a crevice, we started calling in a loud voice; fortunately for us we were heard by a countryman who was passing by, and, with his help, we were freed from that dungeon

This has to be seen in the larger picture of the challenge mounted against Rome by Martin Luther and the Protestants, as a consequence of which large parts of Europe had rejected the authority of the Roman pontiff. Rome, through the radical reforms of the Council of Trent, was fighting back, enlisting a new morality, and the lures of rhetoric, art, music and literature in its battle against the Protestant secession threatening to obliterate the Catholic vision of the universe.

Post-Reformation Catholicism wanted to rebrand itself as akin to the earliest Christianity “austere, persecuted and virtuous”. Bosio’s holy skeletons took a leading part in this counter offensive.

Dressed in metal armour, they would be the new soldiers of steel who would take on the pestiferous Lutherans, as Giacomo Bosio referred to them.

Those skeletons were exported by the hundreds from Rome, mostly to churches on the frontier of the struggle against the Protestant rebellion. Though not exclusively there.

By 1780 Count Ciantar had inventoried at least 36 corpi santi from the Roman catacombs fanatically venerated in Maltese and Gozitan churches, and hundreds of others found their way to every corner of Catholic Europe.

Thanks also to Antonio Bosio, martyromania spread like wildfire in the seicento Catholic world. It caught on most effectively in Germany, the hot frontier between the Catholic resistants and the Protestant reformers. The catacomb saints performed mind-boggling miracles, and the faithful organised great festas in their names, to the edification of the Catholic Masses and the disgust of the Protestant tourists.

Very recently Paul Koudounaris published a truly splendid book on the highly-charged cult of the Roman catacomb martyrs, especially in Germany, illustrated by dozens of spooky images of skeletons dressed up in the most sumptuous clothing, armours and jewellery, not a sight for those who relish eye candy.

More gems went into the hollows of holy skulls then appeared in debutantes’ balls.

Bosio’s discoveries gave rise to a roaring, if pious, export trade in miraculous bones, besides inspiring whole decades of ‘tunnel tourism’ in Rome itself.

One of this book’s reviewers, Anthony Grafton, made a very strong case for Bosio’s central role in the catacomb spillover from Rome to the rest of Europe.

Three images claim to be portraits of Antonio Bosio, but I do not believe in their authenticity. An early one in the headquarters of the Order of St John in Via Condotti, Rome (the Bosio family home) is the one most favoured by tradition, because it shows a young adult with rather Moorish features and a truncated inscription. The problem with this portrait is that it represents a knight of Malta, a Bali of the Order, and I have not found any evidence that Antonio ever was one.

There was then the portrait in oils (now apparently lost) in the series of illustrious Maltese personages commissioned by the surgeon Fr Giuseppe Zammit in the early 18th century, many of which now hang in the corridors of the Old University of Valletta. These likenesses were mostly generic, not painted from life.

Finally there is a lithograph portrait inserted in the Victorian cultural magazine L’Arte – again, almost certainly a figment of fantasy.

Antonio Bosio died in Rome on September 6, 1629, just after dictating a will in virtue of which he instituted the Order of Malta as his universal heir. He left a small house in Malta to (the Maltese?) Rodrigo Vincella, subject to the condition that he would only take possession of it on the death of Fra Giannotto Bosio (his father).

By sheer coincidence, Fra Giannotto obliged; he passed away in Rome immediately after – documents already refer to him as deceased on October 13, 1629.

The archaeologist left a conspicuous inheritance, among other, the imposing palace in Via dei Condotti, Rome, today the headquarters of the Order of Malta.

He also had an important art collection, which included paintings by Antonio Caracci, Giacomo Borbone (Bordone?), Jacopo Bassano, Antiveduto Grammatica, Fir­minetto(?), Francesco Albani and Titian. The family portraits comprised one of his uncle Giacomo the historian by Lavinia Fontana, one on panel of Giannotto Bosio Senior by Raphael (Sanzio) of Urbino, and another of his hush hush father Fra Giannotto Junior.

He also bequeathed his own portrait to the Order.

Antonio Bosio left instructions that his corpse be buried in the church of San Biagio at Montecitorio. At some time after his death, the church was pulled down to make way for the building of a papal palace to accommodate offices.

Antonio was almost certainly conceived where the Maltese Parliament now meets; his remains rest where the Italian Parliament now meets.

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Maroma Camilleri, Fra John Critien and Dr Simon Mercieca.

(Concluded)