Pio Filippani Ronconi

Pio Alessandro Carlo Fulvio Filippani Ronconi (10 March 1920 – 11 February 2010) was an Italian orientalist, Waffen-SS soldier and author.

He was born in Madrid, Spain, and died in Rome.

He was born out of a 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 until the Civil War, when his mother was shot by Republicans after which he and his family returned to Italy.

By this period he was competent in Italian, Spanish, Catalan, Arabic, Greek and Latin, and later studied several additional languages including Turkish, Hebrew, Chinese, Tibetan, Sanskrit and Persian among others.

Due to his wide command of languages, he worked for the Italian radio company EIAR as a foreign news reader.

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 thoroughly studied 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.

After the fall of Benito Mussolini and the creation of the Italian Social Republic, he enlisted in the Italian SS-Legion, later reorganized as the 29th Division of the Waffen-SS "Italia" reaching the rank of Obersturmführer.

He fought at Nettuno, receiving the Second-Class Iron Cross during the battle.

He was probably the last surviving member of the Bataillon "Degli Oddi".

After the end of the war he continued his studies, getting to know Massimo Scaligero personally and through him the works of Rudolf Steiner.

He then elaborated his own conception of anthroposophy, cleansed by its Christian aspects and focused on the ancient Indo-European paganism.

When Italy entered World War II (10 June 1940), he enlisted as a volunteer, fighting in Libya.

He was wounded twice and he was decorated for his valour.

During the early 1950s he was sent to Persia to gather political and military information in the area.

He collaborated with several Latin American intelligence services: in 1950, he had written a report about the political and military situation of Bolivia, foreseeing a revolution which broke out several months later.

In 1959 he became a key 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.

During the same period, he continued working for the Italian government.

He was officially employed at the foreign radio office of the Prime Minister of Italy and also worked for the Italian intelligence services as translator.

In 1965, he was one of the lecturers at a 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.

As his lecture was thought to have been devised and used to plan a general "strategy of tension" to destabilize Italian democratic system, and due to one of his students, Delfo Zorzi, being enquired for material responsibility.

However inquiries proved that he was not involved in any way.

He continued working for Italian intelligence until the 1970s.

He also worked with the Italian Ministry of Defence, as cryptographer and translator of oriental languages.

In 2000, he entered a collaboration with the national newspaper Corriere della Sera, writing articles about Eastern philosophy, but he was dismissed from the newspaper, after a reader denounced him as serving in the Waffen-SS during World War Two.

At some point before his death in 2010, he converted to Eastern Orthodoxy, and his funeral was conducted in accordance with the Russian Orthodox rite.