Alessandro D'Alessandro

Alessandri (Alexander de Alexandro), 1461-1523

Neapolitan humanist and antiquarian; friend of Pomponio and other members of his circle

Relations with Pomponio Leto—Testimonia

"Deambulabam aliquando Romae cum Pomponio Laeto, viro literarum & locorum veterum exequentissimo, cumque antiquitatis studio ruinas urbis et veterum monumenta, quicquid visendum esset et memorabile, scrutaremur, in ruinis templi Pacis, grandioribus literis extantibus, effractum ibi marmor legimus hac inscriptione: IN CVRIA HOSTILIA. Quaerebat a me Pomponius ubinam curiam Hostiliam quondam fuisse crederem, cumque me arbitrari apud Rostra Hostiliam curiam fuisse ibique Tullum Hostilium regem curiam iuxta Rostra construxisse (authore Varrone) respondissem, Rostra autem in foro esse romano, siquidem ex rostris navium Antiatum suggestum in foro extructum legimus, in quibus clarorum virorum imagines, qui reipublicae navarunt operam, pro immortali gloria saepe statui et coli solebant, fuisseque duarum [ed. 1537 duorum] generum curias, unum in quo sacerdotes res divinas, sacra et caeremonias cultusque deorum curarent, alterum ubi senatum de rebus publicis et ad populum pertinentibus consulerent, Quid tu, inquit Pomponius, cum simpliciter curiam nulla cognominis adiectione apud authores legimus nominari, de qua intelligi oportere censes? [The conversation continues on various curiae mentioned in Varro, Festus, Livy, Suetonius, Gellius, Cicero, and Pliny.] Sed quia nullo nominis cognomento frequenter curiam apud authores legimus, de qua intelligi conveniat, equidem dubito. Tamen si me opinio non fallit, inquit Pomponius, memini Asconium Pedianum dicere Rostra ad comitium, prope iuncta curiae fuisse, nulla propria denominatione exprimens curiam, licet alio translata, et nova post modum facta sit. Ex hoc arbitror, inquit, id quod necessario redundat, cum in rostris olim cura [ed. 1537 curia] Hostilia fuerit, ut Varro et authores tradunt, cum simplici nomine curiam absque cognomento enunciari videmus, antequam alio translata foret, de Hostilia, quam ibi legimus fuisse, intelligi oportere."

(Quae et quot curiae Romae fuerint, et verbum Curia, sine adjecione nominis, quam curiam designarit, in Alesandri de Alexandro Dies geniales. Romae: in aedibus Iacobi Mazochii Ro. Academiae bibliopolae, 1522 Kalendis Apri. 1522\1 IV!), I.16.

"I was once walking in Rome with Pomponio Leto, a man most studious of ancient literature and places, and when in our enthusiasm for antiquity we were investigating the ruins of the city and the monuments of the ancients, whatever was memorable and worth seeing, we beheld there, in the ruins of the temple of Peace, since its rather large letters were still visible, a broken piece of marble with this inscription: IN CVRIA HOSTILIA. Pomponius was asking me where in the world I believed the Curia Hostilia to have been at one time, and when I had replied that I thought the Curia Hostilia had been near the Rostra and that King Tullus Hostilius (according to Varro) had constructed his Curia next to the Rostra, moreover that the Rostra are in the Forum Romanum, since we read that a platform was erected in the Forum out of the beaks of the ships of Antium, on which (Rostra) the images of famous men who served the Republic were often accustomed to be set up and revered to their undying glory, and that there had been Curias of two kinds, one in which priests took care of divine matters, rites and ceremonies, and the worship of the gods, the other where they [? the Romans] consulted the Senate on government and matters pertaining to the people, "To which one do you think they refer," said Pomponius, "when we read in the sources that the Curia is simply named without the addition of any proper name? [The conversation continues on various curiae mentioned in Varro, Festus, Livy, Suetonius, Gellius, Cicero, and Pliny.] But since we frequently read 'the Curia' in the sources without any added name, I am quite in doubt about which one it is proper to understand 'curia'. Nevertheless," said Pomponius, "if I am not mistaken, I remember that Asconius Pedianus said the Rostra at the Comitium was almost joined to the Curia, saying 'Curia' without any proper denomination, even if it was transferred elsewhere and later made new. From this I observe, he said, that which is necessarily redundant, that, since the Curia Hostilia was at one time at the Rostra, as Varro and the sources have it, when we see ['Curia'] expressed by the simple term and without an additional name, before it was transferred elsewhere, it should be understood to concern the Curia Hostilia, which we read was there."

Which and how many curiae there may have been in Rome, and which Curia is designated by the word Curia without the adjective of the name …) (Edited and translated with R. W. Ulery, Jr.)

The verso of the title page of Pomponius Laetus's Romanae historiae compendium (Venezia, B. Vitali, 23 IV 1499) (IGI 7987), in the copy belonging to the Biblioteca Casanatense, Vol. Inc. 1581, contains the following ms. note: "Alexander ab Alexandro genial. Dier. Lib. 1 c. 16 Loquens de Pomponio Laeto sic ait. Deambulabam aliquando Romae cum Pomponio Laeto, viro literarum & locorum veterum exequentissimo."

Life and Works

Alessandro Alessandri was born in Naples in 1461 and died in Rome, probably on 2 October 1523. After his first years of study at the grammar school of Giuniano Maio in Naples, he moved to Rome, where he attended the lectures of Domizio Calderini, Niccolò Perotti, and Francesco Filelfo. Returning to Naples, he took his doctorate in law and practiced for a number of years in Rome and Naples before giving up the profession to devote himself to literary studies. Among his humanist friends in Naples were Giovanni Pontano, Jacopo Sannazaro, Gabriele Altilio, Andrea Matteo Acquaviva, il Compatre, and Elio Marchese; in Rome, Platina, Pomponio Leto, Raffaele Maffei, Ermolao Barbaro, Girolamo Porcari, Giovanni Lorenzi, Sigismondo dei Conti da Foligno, and Paolo Cortesi. .

His only published work is a vast treatise, Dies geniales, probably completed in the first decade of the sixteenth century and dedicated to Andrea Matteo Acquaviva, which circulated in manuscript until it was printed in Rome in 1522 "in aedibus I. Mazochii." It is described by M. de Nichilo as "un enorme zibaldone di varia erudizione," ("D'Alessandro [Alessandri], Alessandro," DBI 31,729-32, at 730). In the spirit of such ancient models as Aulus Gellius' Noctes Atticae and Macrobius' Saturnalia and similar antiquarian works of his own times, it ranges over the most disparate topics of the ancient world from Roman institutions and law (his major interest and contribution) to everyday life, philosophy, religion and magic, natural science, archaeology, grammar, and text criticism. Only a few chapters were afterwards reprinted in Italy, but its popularity in France and Germany is attested by more than 30 new editions or reprints between 1539 and 1673 (usually with the title Genialium dierum libri sex).

D'Alessandro's mention of his conversation with Pomponio Leto, during a walk in Rome, not only testifies to his contacts with Pomponio and the antiquarian interests that Pomponio shared with other humanists, but also offers interesting glimpses of early topographical studies and the debates among the antiquarians over the identification and location of individual monuments and sites in the ancient city, in this case the Curia Hostilia. In his interpolated version of the Regionary Catalogue, Pomponio had followed Biondo Flavio in locating the Curia Hostilia on the Caelian hill near the later Church of SS. Paolo e Giovanni (i.e., among the ruins of the Temple of Claudius). (See Pomponio's Descrizione interpolata delle quattordici regioni di Roma, Regio II. Caelimontium, in Valentini-Zucchetti, vol. I, 209 and Biondo Flavio's Roma instaurata, ibid., vol. IV, 277 and n. 4. On the location of the Rostra, see also ibid., 300-01 and n. 1, p. 301. For recent scholarship on the history and location of the curia, see F. Coarelli, "Curia Hostilia," in Lexicon topographicum Urbis Romae, ed. E. M. Steinby, 6 vols. [Roma 1993-2000], vol. I, 331-32.)

Patricia Osmond
February 2013; rev. May 2013

This entry can be cited as follows:

Patricia Osmond, "Alessandro d'Alessandro," Repertorium Pomponianum (URL: www.repertoriumpomponianum.it/pomponiani/d_alessandro_alessandro.htm,

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