After graduating in political science, he dedicated his career to filmmaking. He became a pupil and assistant of
Pasquale Festa Campanile from 1972 to 1979, and also worked for
Salvatore Samperi,
Steno and
Giorgio Capitani. In 1979 he directed his first film,
The Face with Two Left Feet, an ironic and comical parody of
Saturday Night Fever with
John Travolta, which had been a hit two years earlier. A year later he met the film actor and director
Paolo Villaggio, who was then filming
Fantozzi contro tutti. Villaggio developed an esteem for Parenti and decided to leave the director's chair to join forces with him. The result was very positive and the pair made another six films with the
Fantozzi character, from
Fantozzi subisce ancora (1983) to
Fantozzi - Il ritorno (1996). His films feature catastrophic and noisy gags, referring back to American silent film, combined with typical situations from Italian comedy (
commedia brillante) and with some authorial motifs, repeated in almost all his films, from the diptych
Scuola di ladri (1986) and
Scuola di ladri - Parte seconda (1987), to the famous trilogy
Le comiche (1990),
Le comiche 2 (1992), and
Le nuove comiche (1994). His film
Le comiche was the fourth-highest-grossing film in Italy in 1990. Parenti claimed in 2012 that he had been
excommunicated twice for sequences in
Le comiche and
Le comiche 2 that he said had been considered outrageous by the
Catholic Church. The spokesman of the
Holy See,
Federico Lombardi, and Cardinal
Velasio De Paolis, who from 2003 to 2008 was secretary of the
Apostolic Signatura, both promptly denied the report, saying that the director was only joking. Anyway, the director considers himself atheist. After the expiry of his contract with Villaggio in 1996, Parenti turned to directing Christmas movies, or
cinepanettoni, starring
Christian De Sica and
Massimo Boldi. Parenti had already experimented in this kind of movie when he was still working with Villaggio; the first such film he directed was ''
Vacanze di Natale '95 (1995). Further films he made set at Christmas time started with Merry Christmas (2001), and ended with Vacanze di Natale a Cortina'' (2011), which registered the third highest takings in Italy that year. In 2020, he directed comedy couple Christian De Sica and Massimo Boldi in
In vacanza su Marte, after a 15-years hiatus. He is one of the few Italian directors to have stayed within a single genre throughout his career. ==Filmography==