He was born in Florence in 1897, where he began his education in technical schools (his father was an engineer at the Military Geographical Institute). After the war experience, he began attending the Faculty of Agriculture at the University of Pisa, but soon abandoned the studies he had begun to devote himself to letters at the Academy of Fine Arts. An elementary school teacher and later an educational director, he began his work as a writer while still young. In 1929 he founded the much more important "Il Frontespizio," to which authors such as Carlo Bo, Mario Luzi, Don Giuseppe De Luca, as well as Gatto, Parronchi and Sereni would contribute. Close in many ways to the exuberant intellectual personality of Giovanni Papini, Bargellini was a conscious bearer of a Catholic culture with strong apologetic, anti-Enlightenment traits, attentive to the popular charm of the peasant and 'strapaesano' world. Leaving the editorship of the magazine in 1938, he was engaged in a vast didactic and popular work. After the war, while continuing a copious literary production, he began political activity in the ranks of the Christian Democrats, and was for a long time councillor for culture in the La Pira juntas in the 1950s. In '66 he was elected mayor: he held the office for only a few months, and was already resigning when the tragedy of the flood fell on Florence, to remedy which he devoted himself with enormous commitment and remarkable organizational ability. From 1968 he was a DC senator. He died in Florence in 1980.