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I was born in Lodi, a town close to Milan, Italy, on October 7th, 1965.
I have always been in love with experimentation. Since I was a child I spent a lot of time building electronic circuits and electromechanical machines of all kinds just to understand how they work. Somehow my room has always been my laboratory also!
After a childhood lived between Italy and Africa, where my family spent 11 years due to my father’s work, I came back to Italy to attend university.
I got my bachelor’s degree in physics in Pisa in 1989 discussing an experimental thesis in high-energy physics on the use of scintillating fibers to build charged-particle detectors.
In the following years, still in Pisa, I did my PhD in Physics, and I participated in a CERN experiment with the purpose of studying the B meson production in 350 GeV/c pion collisions on a fixed target. In this experiment I was mainly involved with the silicon microstrip detector used to measure the decay vertex of short-lived particles. For my PhD thesis I studied the correlated production of charm-anticharm pairs.
Starting in 1994 I got a post-doc position at UCLA to work in the NOMAD CERN experiment. In this experiment, for which the physics goal was to find neutrino oscillations, I worked on the data acquisition, the event reconstruction software, and the analysis of events with electrons.
In this period I lived in France, close to CERN. Working at CERN has been a fantastic experience! In those years at CERN I met Viviana, a physicist also, who became my wife in the following years.
In 1997 I got a permanent researcher position in the Rome department of the Italian Nuclear Physics Institute (INFN). We lived in Rome up to spring 2000. In this period I collaborated with the ATLAS experiment at CERN and the KLOE experiment at the Frascati INFN Laboratory.
We then all moved to Cagliari, Sardinia Island, Italy, and in the local INFN department located at the Cagliari University I started my work in the CERN LHCb experiment. The purpose of LHCb is the study of the CP violation in the beauty sector. This experiment will be performed at the CERN Large Hadron Collider and is planned to start in 2007.
Here in Cagliari I organize a laboratory to study and build gas detectors. In particular we are currently involved in building part of the Muon Detector using a new gas detector technology, GEMs. But all this will be discussed in detail in my blog!
  Life here in Sardinia is wonderful, and we are very happy living here. The natural environment is just fantastic, the weather is mild, and we always try, during the weekends, to have a walk at the sea or in the mountains. I have a mountain bike and when I have some free time I start exploring the mountains around Cagliari. There are many other sport activities that one can do in this region; the ones I prefer are mountain climbing and scuba diving.
My wife Viviana has a post-doc position at the physics department and she is developing detectors for medical physics. We have two daughters: Marta, born in Rome in December 1998, and Camilla, born in Cagliari in May 2001.
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