Born on 26 December 1863, third of the five sons of Giulio Bastianelli (1824-1904), physician to the Santo Spirito Hospital, Rome, and his wife Teresa Zonca, he was a pupil of Francesco Durante (1844-1934) Hon FRCS. With his elder brother Giuseppe (1862-1959) he worked for several years in the pathological laboratory of Ettore Marchiafava the pioneer malariologist. Bastianelli was director of the Royal Institute of Clinical Surgery and Professor of Clinical Surgery in the Royal University of Rome for many years. His pupils dedicated volume 18 of the *Archivio italiano di Chirurgia* to him in 1927, and he retired from his official posts in 1932. He continued to practise and operate almost to the end of his long life at his nursing home in the Via Regina Margherita. He was instrumental in building the nurses' school and home, named after Queen Elena, at the Policlinic in 1910, and was a member of the National Commission for Medicine and a Senator of Italy from 1929. He removed a dermoid cyst of the mediastinum in 1889, and was particularly interested in abdominal and later in neurological surgery. He worked at the London Hospital and in North America, and was elected an Honorary Fellow of the College at the last International Medical Congress in London in 1913. During the war of 1914-18 he commanded a surgical unit at the Italian front, and immediately after it went on a lecture tour in the USA with French and English-colleagues. Bastianelli married in 1903 Miss Loomis of Pittsburg. He died on 1 September 1961, aged 97; his brother and colleague Giuseppe had died on 30 March 1959, aged 96. They had been awarded jointly the first gold medal of the Roman Order of Physicians in 1958. He was a collector and connoisseur of pictures and books, and left his library to the University. He was also a successful farmer and a scientific forester. He was a keen alpinist and yachtsman, and for many years into old age piloted his own light aircraft. He was active in the International Society of Surgery, and held many honorary memberships including those of the British Medical Association and the Royal Society of Medicine.