Giovanni Battista de Rossi

Giovanni Battista (Carlo) de Rossi (23 February 1822 – 20 September 1894) was an Italian archaeologist, famous even outside his field for rediscovering early Christian catacombs.

Born in Rome, he applied the sciences of archaeology and epigraphy, and leveraged his thorough knowledge of the topography of Rome, not to mention the resources of the Vatican Library, where he was employed cataloguing manuscripts. These skills he brought to Early Christian sites and guided the development of a new field, Christian archaeology. He travelled widely, knew all the museum collections intimately and was at the center of a network of professional friendships with all the European scholars of his fields.

In 1849 he rediscovered the lost Catacombs of Callixtus along the Via Appia Antica, with Alexander . The catacombs were opened in the early 3rd century, as the principal Christian cemetery in Rome, where nine 3rd-century popes were buried. He published illustrations by Gregorio Mariani.

In 1877 he became foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 1882, he was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society.

In 1888 de Rossi discovered that the Codex Amiatinus, the earliest surviving manuscript of the complete Bible in the Latin Vulgate version, was related to the Bibles mentioned by Bede. It was also established that the Codex Amiatinus was related to the Greenleaf Bible fragment in the British Library. For a thousand years the Codex Amiatinus was believed to be Italian in origin. It was only at that time that de Rossi discovered that the original inscription was that of Ceolfrith of the English.

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