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Mario Guarnacci (October 25, 1701 – August 21, 1785) was an Italian prelate, archeologist, and historian. He was one of the first scholars to carry out systematic excavations of Etruscan tombs.
Mario pursued his first education in Volterra in a school sponsored by the Piarists. At the age of 17, he pursued studies in Florence under various teachers, including Philosophy and Theology with the Piarists; Mathematics under Lorenzo Lorenzini; and classic literature under Anton Maria Salvini. Mario would in 1751 submit a short biography of Salvini for the Vite degli Arcadi illustri published in Rome. Among the student peers of Mario in Florence were the future erudite scholars Gori and Giovanni Lami. In early 1720, he began studies in civil and canon law at the University of Pisa attending lessons by Bernardo Tanucci and Giuseppe Averani. However, he never obtained a degree. He did frequent the scholarly academies of Florence including the Apatisti.
After recovering from a serious illness by 1726, he moved to Rome again to study law, hoping for an appointment with the papal Curia. Fortunately in 1730 the pope Clement XII, from the Florentine Corsini family, appointed a prebend of the Abbey of San Girolamo in Pisa, with a stipend. He received further appointments in 1731 as papal chamberman of honor and auditor for the Cardinal Alamanno Salviati. In 1733, he was inducted as a Roman priest and in 1734 was a canon of San Giovanni in Laterano. In the 1740s, Pope Benedict XIV charged him to continue Alfonso Chacón's Lives of the Popes, but in 1757, Guarnacci retired back to Volterra. He discovered there the remains of Thermae. He also collected a large number of Etruscan antiquities, which he bequeathed to his native city for a public museum, and form the core of the present Museo Etrusco Guarnacci. The donation also included a rich library of more than volumes.
His most important work was Le Origini Italiche, first published in 1767 in Lucca. Origini italiche o siano Memorie istorico-etrusche sopra l'antichissimo regno d'Italia e sopra i di lei primi abitatori nei secoli più remoti, volume 1, by Monsignor Mario Guarnacci, Paolo Giunchi Press, Rome, 1785. in which he maintained the chronological priority of the Etrusco-Pelasgians over the other peoples of Italy and Greece. According to Guarnacci, the Pelasgians-Tyrrhenians of Italy migrated in Prehistory and brought an Italic culture to savage and uncouth Greece. Guarnacci's theories gave rise to a lively controversy involving several prominent historians and scholars of the period, such as Giovanni Lami, Scipione Maffei and Antonio Francesco Gori.
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