Aldo Capitini (23 December 1899 – 19 October 1968) was an Italian philosopher, poet, political activist, anti-fascist, and educator.

Thus, I understood the limitations of my activist culture in the fibres of my being, which gave paramount value to action, to violence, and to enjoyment, and I felt a deep interest in, and solidarity with, the problems of those who suffer, those who cannot act, and those who are overwhelmed.

I would need to envisage a reality where suffering people were perfectly well, and not thrown on the edge of civilization, waiting for death and nothingness.

In order to survive, he returned to his family in Perugia, where he undertook private lessons until the end of World War II in 1945.

He published three books on philosophy and religion, which passed the Fascist censorship, with support from the liberal philosopher Benedetto Croce.

It was successful and spread to other cities, including Ferrara, Florence, Bologna, Lucca, Arezzo, Ancona, Assisi and Naples.

[7] Capitini stood aside from the Cold War and the new Italian Republic, but promoted causes and became the most important exponent of nonviolence in Italy.

The outcome of the conference was the creation of the Italian Vegetarian Society, with Capitini as president and based in Perugia.

The society became a collective effort after 20 years based on Capitini's personal control; it continues as the Italian Vegetarian Association.

In 1961, with the help of political forces of the Left, Capitini promoted a 24 km March for Peace and the Brotherhood of Peoples from Perugia to Assisi in 1961, in the context of international tension.

Capitini organized the National Conference on Disarmament Affairs in Florence in 1962, and held a seminar on techniques of nonviolence in Perugia in 1963, with the participation of leaders of the Committee of 100.

(Associazione per la difesa e lo sviluppo della scuola pubblica italiana [Association for the protection and development of the Italian public school]).

Capitini was influenced by meeting Claudio Baglietto, a philosopher and conscientious objector who died in exile in Switzerland.

His own background had components that Massimiliano Fortuna[13] defined in an essay: integral parts of the Kantian criticism (for the primacy of the moral law), idealism (Hegel, Benedetto Croce, Giovanni Gentile), Marxian analysis and Gandhian spirituality.

To these elements, Norberto Bobbio (1984) added the influence of Giacomo Leopardi (poet and writer) and Giuseppe Mazzini (politician and philosopher).

Capitini, as he wrote in his Letters of Religion, published posthumously in the book The Power of All,[14] to form his own ideas went back "to the teachers of religious life",[15] enumerated as Jesus Christ, Buddha, St. Francis of Assisi, Gandhi and Mazzini.