Pio Filippani Ronconi

Pio Alessandro Carlo Fulvio Filippani Ronconi (10 March 1920 – 11 February 2010) was an Italian orientalist. He was born in Madrid, Spain, and died in Rome.

Biography

Pio Filippani Ronconi in the uniform of a foreign volunteer of the Waffen-SS. He is wearing the collar tabs of the 1st battalion of the Waffen-Grenadier-Brigade der SS (italienische Nr. 1).

He was born out of a very ancient Black Aristocratic family (his father being Count Fulvio Filippani Ronconi and his mother Anita Tamagno), tracing back to the Roman patriciate. He grew up in Spain up to the Civil War, when his mother was shot by Republicans and he came back in Italy with his family. He had already learned Italian, Spanish, Catalan, Arabic, Greek and Latin, and now he studied at the university several oriental languages such as Turkish, Hebrew, Chinese, Tibetan, Sanskrit, Persian, and others. For this reason, he worked for the Italian radio company EIAR as reader of news in foreign languages.

At the same time, his spiritual interests brought him to study and practice the tantras, and to know Julius Evola, Arturo Reghini and other members of the Ur Group. He studied thoroughly tantrism and gnosticism, in different cultural contexts, as well as the faiths and rituals of ancient Italy, from the Iguvine Tablets to Ancient Roman religion.

When Italy entered World War II (10 June 1940), he enlisted as a volunteer in the Arditi (elite storm troops), fighting in Libya. He was wounded twice and he was decorated for his valour. After the fall of Benito Mussolini and the constitution of Italian Social Republic, he enlisted as a volunteer private, then confirmed as an Obersturmführer (literally "Senior Stormleader", roughly equivalent to Senior Lieutenant), in the Italian SS-Legion, then reorganized as the 29th Division of the Waffen-SS “Italia”. He fought defending the Axis front at Nettuno, receiving the Second-Class Iron Cross. He was probably the last surviving member of the Bataillon "Degli Oddi", having taken part in that battle.

After the war he continues his studies, getting to know personally Massimo Scaligero and, through him, the works by Rudolf Steiner. He then elaborated his own conception of anthroposophy, cleansed by its Christian aspects and focused on the ancient Indo-European paganism, even though during the war he had already declared to German military authorities to be heathen. Since 1959, he began his academic career, being the most important pupil of Giuseppe Tucci, the most important Italian orientalist at the time. He taught both at the University of Naples "L'Orientale" and at the School of Orientalistics in Venice. Its most fundamental work was about the Pāli Canon.

At the same time, he continued working for the Italian state. He was officially employed, with different mansions, at the foreign radio office for the Prime Minister of Italy, but he also worked for the intelligence services as translator and, thanks to his wide knowledge of Sanskrit, he becomes a great expert in the decryption of messages intercepted by the Italian intelligence agencies. At the beginnings of the 1950s he is sent in Persia to gather political and military information in the area. He collaborated with several Latin American intelligence services: in 1950, for example, he had written a report about the political and military situation of Bolivia, foreseeing a revolution who broke few months after. He continued working for the intelligence up to the 1970s. He also works with the Italian Ministry of Defence, as cryptographer and translator of oriental languages.

In 1965, he was one of the lecturer at the conference about revolutionary war held at the Hotel "Parco dei Principi" in Rome, which was organized by Fascist politician Pino Rauti and his Ordine Nuovo organization. He was later questioned by the court about the Piazza Fontana bombing (12 December 1969), since his lecture was thought to have been devised and used to plan a general "strategy of tension" to destabilize Italian democratic system, and since one of his students, Delfo Zorzi, was enquired for material responsibility, but inquiries proved that he was not involved in any way.

In 2000, he entered a collaboration with the national newspaper Corriere della Sera, writing articles about Eastern philosophy, but he was dismissed, after that a reader denounced with a letter to the newspaper the fact that Filippani Ronconi had served in Waffen-SS during the war. He died in 2010.

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