Kingdom of Italy. Rome. 1923. Ministerial document with the rare signature of Education minister Giovanni Gentile; one of the most important italian philosopher. Giovanni Gentile (May 30, 1875 – April 15, 1944) was an Italian neo-Hegelian Idealist philosopher and politician, a peer of Benedetto Croce. He described himself as 'the philosopher of Fascism', and ghostwrote A Doctrine of Fascism (1932) for Benito Mussolini. He also devised his own system of philosophy, Actual Idealism. Giovanni Gentile was born in Castelvetrano, Sicily. He was inspired by Italian intellectuals such as Mazzini, Rosmini, Gioberti, and Spaventa from whom he borrowed the idea of autoctisi, "self-construction", but also was strongly influenced by the German idealist and materialist schools of thought — namely Karl Marx, Hegel, and Fichte with whom he shared the ideal of creating a Wissenschaftslehre, theory for a structure of knowledge that makes no assumptions. Friedrich Nietzsche, too, influenced him, as seen in an analogy between Nietzsche's Ãœbermensch and Gentile's Uomo Fascista. He won a fierce competition to become one of four exceptional students of the prestigious Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, where he enrolled in the Faculty of Humanities. Gentile as a Director of the historic Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. During his academic career, Gentile was a Professor of the History of Philosophy at the University of Palermo, Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Pisa, Professor of the History of Philosophy at the University of Rome, professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Rome, Commissioner of the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Director of the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa and Vice President of Bocconi University in Milan (1934 to 1944). In 1923 he was named Minister of Public Education for the government of Benito Mussolini. In this capacity he instituted the “Riforma Gentileâ€.

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