Gentile Camilla was slaveholder, merchant, shipowner, and citizen of Genoa. The son of Cattaneo Camilla, he belonged to the Guelf faction and was a long-serving citizen-administrator of the fifteenth-century Republic of Genoa.

He was born in the first half of the fifteenth century into an prominent Genoese noble family that supplied officeholders to both the commune and the Casa di San Giorgio. His public career began early: Treccani records him in 1451 as magistrate of security, corrector of customs, and war commissioner in the western Riviera, while eighteenth-century office lists place him among the reformers or correctors of public morals in later decades as well.

By the 1460s he had entered the central government of Genoa, serving repeatedly in the consilium antianorum in 1462, 1464/65, and later again in 1478, 1482, and 1484.  He also held consultative and fiscal offices, appearing as consul, official of Caratata, official of Moneta, elector, partitor, official of the Salt, official of the banks, and protector of the hospital. Camilla’s administrative importance was especially visible in Genoa’s colonial system: in 1466 he was selected by the protectors of San Giorgio as consul of Caffa. Because Ottoman naval power made the sea route dangerous, he travelled overland with papal safe-conducts, and during his twenty-six months in Caffa he served for thirteen months simultaneously as consul, provvisore, and massaro. There he had to manage ethnic and religious tensions, disorder among Genoese officials, clandestine trade in military supplies, and Genoese involvement in Tatar politics.

After returning to Genoa, he continued to serve in offices connected to Caffa in 1474 and 1475, and after Caffa fell to the Ottomans he was appointed to the office of Chios, then the most important remaining Genoese possession in the Levant. In 1475 he was also entrusted, while travelling to Rome on his own affairs, with an embassy to Pope Sixtus IV to request aid against the Ottoman threat to Chios. His later career shifted toward military and territorial administration: he was commissary in Corsica in 1480, captain of a galley in 1481, commissary in the attempt to take Massa in 1482, and commissary for San Giorgio in the Lunigiana and Sarzana war zone in 1484 and 1487. In the early 1490s he served one of his last major posts as governor of Corsica, an office that brought difficulties because of opposition to the actions of his vicarius, Giacomo de Fornari; he remained politically active into 1499 and died between August 1503 and February 1504, leaving his son Niccolò as universal heir.