Nardi e Gentile

In 1914, intended to leave the priesthood, Bruno Nardi asked – with a letter decisive both for Nardi’s intellectual career and the understanding of his intellectual development – Giovanni Gentile for support, to help him facing the material troubles that this choice would inevitably cause to him. From then on the bond between the two became more and more stronger, culminating (after Gentile’s death, but in coherence with his academic legacy) in Nardi’s call in Rome’s University in 1951. Following a path already traced by Giorgio Stabile and other prominent scholars, the present essay addresses the topic of the conceptual debt of the young Nardi to the Idealism of Gentile (and Croce) and outlines the evolution of his work as an historian of Medieval Philosophy and more in general as a professional philosophy historian within its proper intellectual context.