He studied at the University of Rome La Sapienza, took his degree in 1855 in natural science and mathematics, and entered his uncle's pharmacy as an assistant.

[1] He subsequently took up his residence in Rome as lecturer on Greek antiquities and greatly interested himself in the Roman Forum excavations.

He also edited the great inscription which contains a collection of the municipal laws of Gortyn in Crete, discovered on the site of the ancient city.

He treats this question again in a treatise on the so-called Peisistratean edition of Homer (La Commissione omerica di Pisistrato, 1881).

His Vergil in the Middle Ages (translated into English by E. F. M. Benecke, 1895) traces the strange vicissitudes by which the great Augustan poet became successively grammatical fetich, Christian prophet and wizard.

In these artefacts, he read traces of the myth of the dismemberment of Dionysus, in which humans supposedly inherit an "original guilt" for the Titans' murder of the young god.