Born in Milan in 1969, he completed his university studies in Pisa as a student of the Scuola Normale Superiore (undergraduate admission competition of the year 1988). After graduating in Greek History, with professor C. Ampolo as supervisor, he obtained his PhD in March 1999, with G. Nenci, C. Ampolo, C. Calame and U. Fantasia as committee members.
Since 2005, he has been associate professor of Greek History at the University of Pavia, in the Department of Musicology and Cultural Heritage at Cremona (following his abilitation in April 2004); previously, since 2001, he had been an adjunct professor. He has also been a visiting professor at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa (academic years 2010/11, 2015/6) and IUSS - Scuola Universitaria Superiore of Pavia (2014/15, 2015/16).
In March 2017 he was awarded the national qualification as full professor for the field of Ancient History.
Between 2006 and 2008 he directed the "Corsi speciali abilitanti", linguistic-literary section, of the University of Pavia (for the qualification of upper secondary school teachers in Lombardy).
The author of monographs and scholarly articles, he has been invited to contribute to international scholarly projects such as the Oxford Handbook of Thucydides (Oxford 2017). He is among the editors of the Lexicon historiographicum Graecum et Latinum, of which the first three volumes have appeared (Pisa 2004, 2007, 2015) and the fourth is forthcoming. His preferred areas of research are Greek historiography (the origins, Thucydides, the historians’ audience) and the history of Archaic Greece, including the West settlements; his curriculum also includes epigraphic and papyrological research, such as the articles devoted to the Artemidorus papyrus. Classical historiography is conceived, first and foremost, as a socio-historical phenomenon; emphasis is placed on the influence of institutionalized collective memory – particularly the Athenian funeral speech for the fallen in war – in shaping some fundamental categories of historiographical thought, such as the focus on the present or the view of the historical process as a completed cycle.