Publio de Tommasi was an Italian painter and watercolorist. Publio de Tommasi was trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome and taught at the Municipal School of Art in Rome. He had as a pupil Alberto Carosi who was one of the 25th of the Roman Campagna. De Tommasi was appreciated, in particular by the British of the Grand Tour, for the genre scenes that he created in costume and that he set, both indoors and outdoors, choosing evocative places, such as old streets and ancient fountains with women in Ciociara costume, smoky trattorias with characters in seventeenth-century clothes, sumptuous rooms in patrician palaces with prelates and cardinals. They were somewhat theatrical representations (the women were always beautiful) but rich in figures and precise in the details. He preferred watercolor to oil, with a more pleasant effect and simpler chromatism. He exhibited in Milan in 1881 "A game of chess", set in a tavern; in Rome in 1883 he presented "Disillusione" and "La Favola", in which he represented an elderly woman surrounded by children; at the National Exhibition of Turin in 1884 he exhibited "Wedding gifts". He joined the Association of Roman Watercolors which brought together the most representative artists who at the beginning of the twentieth century, in Rome, chose to express themselves with the watercolor technique. Works by Publio de Tommasi are now preserved in the Melbourne and Sidney Museums. He died in Rome in 1914 at the age of 65.