Lino Pertile

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Lino Pertile (born 1940) is an Italian linguist, Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University and the current House Master of Eliot House. Born in Italy near Padua, he taught at the universities of Reading, Sussex, and Edinburgh before coming to Harvard.

His specialty is Dante scholarship, a field in which he has published widely. Dante studies were made great in the United States by a previous Harvard scholar, the Victorian Charles Eliot Norton. Lino Pertile also studies the Italian twentieth-century novel. In 2005 he was named Harvard College Professor, a special teaching recognition awarded to those faculty members who have most invested their time and energy in teaching undergraduates.

Owing to his work on Dante, a minor fire in Eliot House's basement in 2001 was nicknamed "Pertile's Inferno."

Pertile and his first wife had a daughter, Laura. He and his second wife Anna Bensted (b. 1957), a producer for WBUR, have two sons, Giulio and Piero.