Baldo Panfili was born in Milan in 1912. Little is documented about his early training, but by May 1946 he was significant enough a figure that Musica Jazz, Italy's own jazz magazine, ran a 12-page biographical and stylistic feature on him ("Cenni biografici - Lo stile"), an article now cataloged as a period source in Fondazione Siena Jazz's national jazz archive, the Centro Nazionale Studi sul Jazz "Arrigo Polillo." No copy of the article's text was located for this profile, only the archive's own catalog record of it, but the record itself is evidence that Panfili had a real, contemporary reputation in Italian jazz circles in the 1940s.

By the early 1950s he was working as a trumpet soloist in Italian dance and studio orchestras. He is credited as soloist on Cetra's 1952 swing side "Washington And Le Swing" (Orchestra Mojetta), and on trumpet on Bruno Canfora's 1955 big-band tribute "Presenta Cole Porter." His most substantial jazz credit came with Armando Trovaioli's orchestra, which he joined among its last additions. On "The Beat Generation," recorded in Rome in 1960 and finally released in 1962, Panfili sits in a five-man trumpet section alongside Oscar Valdambrini, Nini Rosso, Nino Culasso and Beppe Cuccaro, playing charts arranged by the American composers Bill Russo, Bill Holman and Bill Smith. That same trumpet lineup, on a Russo composition called "Blues," was later reissued on Musica Jazz's own 1989 retrospective "Italian Jazz Graffiti 2," a compilation that otherwise gathers Gianni Basso, Dino Piana, Franco Cerri, Attilio Donadio, Armando Trovaioli and Giorgio Gaslini onto a single LP. Panfili's trumpet is also individually credited, on separate tracks, across Riviera Jazz Records' 1996 reissue pair documenting Italian jazz of the 1930s and 1940s.

Alongside this session work, Panfili held the trumpet chair in RAI's Rome Orchestra, the state broadcaster's in-house ensemble. Per the Italian jazz history blog Jazz from Italy, he retired from that chair in 1971, at which point Oscar Valdambrini took his seat and joined the orchestra's ranks. Italian Wikipedia's own account of Valdambrini's career instead dates his start as the RAI Rome Orchestra's lead trumpet to 1972, a one-year discrepancy between the two sources that could not be resolved and is disclosed here rather than picked.

Under his own name, Panfili's recording career ran in an entirely separate direction. Billed as Baldo Panfili E La Sua Orchestra, and released internationally as "Baldo Panfili et son orchestre," his own catalog is instrumental dance and bolero pop: a 1960 EP backing vocalist Licia Morosini on "Granada," "Noche De Ronda" and "Siboney," a "Souvenir D'Italie" single, and a credited spot, per a Bibliothèque nationale de France catalog record, on a 1957 Venetian song festival release alongside vocalist Natalino Otto, one of the founding names of Italian swing singing. None of this carries a jazz genre tag anywhere it has been documented. Panfili was also, separately, a trumpet member of the Rocky Mountains Ol' Time Stompers, an Italian group Discogs itself describes as specializing in Western and American folk songs rather than jazz. No death date for Panfili was located in any source checked for this profile.

Panfili's documented playing sits squarely in the swing and big-band tradition: his earliest dated jazz credit (1952) carries Discogs' own Swing and Big Band style tags, and his best-known later credit, Armando Trovaioli's "The Beat Generation," is tagged Cool Jazz, a mid-century American-influenced big-band sound built around charts from Bill Russo, Bill Holman and Bill Smith, three arrangers associated with the Stan Kenton and Woody Herman big-band lineages. His inclusion, on the strength of that same trumpet-section work, in two dedicated archival jazz reissues (Musica Jazz's own 1989 compilation and Riviera Jazz Records' 1996 pair covering 1930s-40s Italian jazz) reflects a real, if secondary, standing among reissue curators as a period jazz trumpeter. Set against that, his own-name leader catalog, made under the RAI-era light-orchestra convention of the time, is bolero, Latin-pop and Italian and Venetian vocal-backing material with no jazz stylistic content by any tag or description found; it is a genuinely separate body of work rather than a jazz catalog described in unflattering terms.