BIANCHINI, Francis, a learned Italian astronomer and antiquary, was born at Verona in 1662, of a noble and ancient family. He was educated at Padua, and devoted himself especially to mathematics and classics. In 1684 he went to Rome, and was made librarian to Cardinal Ottoboni, afterwards Pope Alexander VIII. He was made canon of Sta Maria de la Rotonda, and afterwards of St Lorenz·o in Damaso. His first work seems to have been a treatise directed against the Copernican system; it was published about 1680. In 1697 appeared the first and only volume of his Universal History, coming down to the close of the Assyrian empire. His later works, with the exception of the Hesperi et Phosphori nova Phaenomena, a series of observations on Venus, were chiefly upon the rui∏3 excavated on the Via Appia and Mount Palatine. He died in 1729