Renato Brunetta was born on 15 May 1950, in Venice, Italy, the youngest of three brothers.

Brunetta once said that as a boy, he often studied classics on his own, to "reduce the social gap between him and his fellow students".

Moreover, he is the founder and editor of the magazine Labor – Reviews of Labor Economics and Industrial Relations, published by Wiley-Blackwell for the Center for Economic and International Studies (CEIS) of the Tor Vergata University.

Together with Vittorio Feltri, he wrote a series of Manuals of Political Conversation published by Libero.

In June 2020, he briefly became a columnist for Il Riformista, a centrist and liberal newspaper directed by Piero Sansonetti, which he left in October 2020.