Panfilo Gentile

Panfilo Gentile
Panfilo Gentile Epoca magazine, 1969
Born	(1889-05-28)28 May 1889 L'Aquila, Abruzzo, Italy
Died	6 July 1971 Rome, Italy
Occupation	lawyer journalist writer politician
Spouse(s)	1. Eva Barbaro di Francavilla (-1964) 2. Roberta Roversi (1941-)
Parent(s)	Vincenzo Gentile Giuseppina Giorgi

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.

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. Between 1911 and 1913 he worked on , a relatively short-lived weekly publication focused on the arts and politics, founded and run by Gaetano Salvemini. He later became a contributor to the socialist daily newspaper, l'Avanti!.

In July 1914 Gentile was an adherent of the neutralist position, speaking out against Italian participation in the war. In 1917/18 he moved from Bologna to Naples where the climate was more benevolent in the context of the respiratory problems he was having. After the war he moved again, to Rome, where he worked as a literary critic on "Il Paese", a daily newspaper set up by Francesco Scozzese () which defined itself, at least in part, through its opposition to Mussolini's newspaper, "Il Popolo d'Italia". 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 published his ambitious "Summary of a philosophy of religion" ("Sommario d'una filosofia della religione").