Fabrizio Petri was born in Ancona on 11th October 1962. He belongs to a family traditionally linked to the Military forces as his father is a pilot officer in the Italian Air Force.

In his early childhood his father's career was the reason of the frequent family moves. Fabrizio Petri spent his childhood in Lecce and then moved to Frosinone and Guidonia, where he attended Liceo Scientifico (High school). Later he moved with his family to Ancona and Falconara Marittima, where he concluded his studies at Secondary School .

He attended university in Bologna, where he graduated in Law discussing his thesis in International Law on Jus Cogens.

After completing the military service as an officer of the ‘Guardia di Finanza’, he decided to pursue a diplomatic career. Not only did his devotion to foreign languages during his university years, but also the frequent periods he spent abroad to join his parents, first in Algeria and then Morocco, where his father worked on military cooperation projects, contributed to his proficiency in English and French, languages that at that time were compulsory to pass the State Exam in order to start a diplomatic carrier.

Since the very beginning of his career on February 13, 1989, he has held several diplomatic functions both abroad and at the headquarters in Rome. He covered the role of First Secretary at the Embassy of Italy in New Delhi and later he held the role of Commercial Counsellor at the Italian Embassy in Paris. In Rome, as well as positions held at the Office of the General Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he covered the position of Head of the Office for Central Europe and the Baltics, and then the position of Head of the Italian Delegation in occasion of the G8 Presidency in 2009.

The experience of the G8 has been narrated in Diplomathìa ... the art of learning twice: messages from the G8 ( Rubbettino , 2010), a collective book edited by Fabrizio Petri along with another Italian Diplomat, Fabrizio Lobasso.

Fabrizio Petri currently holds the rank of Minister Plenipotentiary and from 1 September 2016 he was appointed Chairman of the Interministerial Committee for Human Rights. From 9 November 2021 he was also appointed Special Envoy of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation for the Human Rights of LGBTIQ+ persons. He lives in Italy but he has developed a growing interest in India, country that he often visits and where he has many friends. He met many figures of international importance, including the American James Hillman and the Italian Tiziano Terzani , with whom he had built a strong friendship.

Fabrizio Petri is also a gay activist, very involved in the struggle for the progress of civil rights and in particular the human rights of LGBTI people, both in Italy and abroad. He is among the founders and was President of the Globe-MAE Association, which groups LGBTI employees of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation.

He is highly interested in the aesthetics of contemporary times, such as the Abstract Expressionism of Pollock and Vedova or in the American Soul Music.

Fabrizio Petri has made the ethical choice not to eat meat or fish and not to wear leather, coherently with a vegetarianism that embraces nonviolence.

His thought

Fabrizio Petri, from some time now an atheist, has set out on a passionate research devoted to two main fields of study that are Analytical Psychology (the area of depth psychology created by C. G. Jung after his break with Freud) and Indian philosophy. In the first area he has expanded his interest to the so called Archetypal Psychology, inaugurated by the American psychologist James Hillman. In the second study area, he has mainly focused on the study of Nonviolence, in the historical and philosophical context of the Jain religion, but he has also focused on its adaptation to the socio-political context started by the Mahatma Gandhi.

In the footsteps of important psychoanalysts such as the American Erik Erikson, Petri has dealt with the study of Nonviolence with the help of psychological insight. His first book, Open Karma, precisely springs from this point of view.

The thought of Fabrizio Petri has also developed in the direction of the liberal political philosophy following the path of two important philosophers, Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlin. Popper’s masterpiece The Open Society and Its Enemies is evoked both in the title Open Karma ( Moretti & Vitali , 2012) as well as in Petri’s second work Open Dharma (Moretti & Vitali , 2014 ). The studying of Isaiah Berlin was instead essential for him to fully understand the historical meaning of Romanticism. The Roots of Romanticism, the famous lecture held by the Latvian philosopher, has had considerable influence on Petri’s depiction of a parallel between the nineteenth-century Romantic poet Shelley and the American poets of the Beat Generation. The conclusion is the understanding of the contribution that both English Romanticism and American Counterculture have given and are still giving to the creation of societies that are becoming more and more pluralistic and tolerant.

The perspective of these different approaches is what gives Petri’s thought its personal touch and it can be synthesised in the central theme of Nonviolence with all its cultural and historical aspects. As a matter of fact, if one hand Shelley 's nonviolent poem The Mask of Anarchy had a direct influence on Gandhi, on the other hand the Mahatma himself has consistently stimulated the thought and action of the main exponents of the American Counterculture .

Finally, what we find at the core of Fabrizio Petri’s work is the analysis of the contemporary societies developed by the sociologist Manuel Castells (The Birth of the Network Society ). Thanks to the mutual existing influences between East and West and faithful to the Transcultural Memory, Petri tries to highlight how the awareness of Nonviolence has contributed to the building of the interconnected and digital contemporary societies with their modern network structure, and it continues to do so, as also demonstrated by the trend of social movements in the network.