Giuseppe Rensi

Giuseppe Rensi (31 May 1871 in Villafranca di Verona – 14 February 1941 in Genoa) was an Italian philosopher.

Early life and education Giuseppe Rensi's father Gaetano was a doctor; his mother was Emilia Wallner, and he also had a sister, Teresa. He attended high school in Verona, then studied law, first in Padua and then in Rome, where he graduated in 1893. As a young man he began to collaborate on socialist-inspired periodicals, for example the Rivista popolare, directed by Napoleone Colajanni, and the Critica Sociale, directed by Filippo Turati. At Turati's invitation he moved to Milan where he began regularly to frequent socialist circles. He also worked on the periodical La lotta di classe.

Exile to Switzerland Following the Milan food riots of May 1898 and their aftermath, he was forced to flee to Switzerland. In his absence he was sentenced to 11 years in prison. In 1903 he obtained Swiss citizenship, and became the first socialist deputy in the parliament of the Canton of Ticino. He lived in Bellinzona where he worked as a lawyer and married the teacher and educationalist Lauretta Perucchi (1873-1966). They had two daughters, Emilia and Algisa. By 1925, however, with his work Apologia dell'ateismo, he opposed Mussolini and was counted among the supporters of Benedetto Croce, having signed Croce's manifesto against Fascism the same year. After his early sympathy with the fascist regime he had become its opponent, and he recognised how the idealistic doctrine of Giovanni Gentile had become the regime's ideological cover. he was definitively dismissed from his post, with the loss of his chair of moral philosophy at the University of Genoa. Instead, he was confined to an office in the university library, for the purpose of drafting a Ligurian bibliography. Her sister Algisa (1899-1994) became a nun, and eventually abbess, living in the convent of Lugo di Romagna until her death.

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