Panfilo Gentile

Panfilo Gentile (28 May 1889 – 6 July 1971) was an Italian journalist, writer and politician.

Another notable journalist, Sergio Romano, wrote of Gentile that he had an irrepressible tendency to deconstruct fashionable ideas, to puncture the balloons of political rhetoric and systematically to destroy received wisdoms.

Life Panfilo Gentile was born in L'Aquila, an ancient city in the mountains between Rome and the Adriatic Sea. He was the eldest son of Vincenzo Gentile, prominent in the area as a lawyer and politician, by his marriage to Giuseppina Giorgi. Panfilo trained as a lawyer. However, rather than following in his father's footsteps, he studied Philosophy with Giorgio Del Vecchio and, while still young, became an unattached philosophy lecturer, later teaching his chosen subject at Bologna and, later, at Naples. He later became a contributor to the socialist daily newspaper, l'Avanti!. During this time he wrote less about the legal themes that had been at the heart of his early published work, turning instead to the history of religions and the origins of Christianity. In 1923 the publishers Laterza published his ambitious "Summary of a philosophy of religion" ("Sommario d'una filosofia della religione"). For half a year, between April and October 1952, Gentile ran the Florence based daily newspaper La Nazione in succession to Sandro Volta. After this he was recruited by to write for Corriere della Sera: he stayed till 1966, the year of his seventy-seventh birthday. At Corriere he sustained his economic liberal credentials, while becoming increasingly critical of the interventionist solutions advocated by political left. Along with this, his writing was characterised by increasing pessimism about Italian politics.