Bio

Last updated: April 2024

I was born on February 25th, 1999 in Agrigento, a small city in Sicily. The very same night, Fabio Fazio interviewed Mikhail Gorbachev at the Festival di Sanremo. I was destined for studying the relationship between politics and culture!

The Concordia Temple, the most famous landmark in my hometown (also a UNESCO world heritage site)

When I was a little boy, I wanted to be a comedian. Since then, I changed my mind hundreds of times about what I wanted to be as a grown-up.

I attended the “Empedocle” classical high school in Agrigento, wanting to be a writer or something like that. But I quickly got bored and decided to change my path. At the age of 18, I moved to Turin, where I have a Bachelor in Mathematics for Engineering with full grades at the Polytechnic of Turin.

The city of Turin, which adopted me during my university years

But then I got bored of doing maths for maths’ sake. I enrolled in a Master’s degree in Political and Public Communication at the University of Turin where I graduated in 2022. At that point, I felt like I found my true passion: studying politics and society through quantitative methods.

I am currently enrolled in the PhD program of Analysis of Social and Economic Processes (ASEP) at the University of Milan-Biccocca. I am working in the fields of political sociology and political psychology. I am currently on a research stay in Antwerp (BE), working with the “Media, Movement, and Politics (M2P)” research group, a wonderful bunch of people who welcomed me warmly and created an incredibly stimulating environment to do research.

The entrance to the Antwerp train station, one of its most famous landmarks

Through the years I have also worked outside academia, in the political communication and marketing fields, managing social media pages and media relations for political organizations and working for electoral campaigns as deputy campaign coordinator and junior researcher for Social Changes, Inc. during the Italian general political elections of September 2022 and the elections for city council in June 2022.

In my free time I still love writing. I also love biking, and listening to music of every genre. My all-time favorites? The Cure, Fabrizio De André, Club Dogo and Elio e le Storie Tese. My favorite directors are Paolo Sorrentino and Wes Anderson (but I swear I am not that kind of hipster). My favorite TV show is probably Scrubs because it’s the only comedy show that I still find amusing after 20 years from its release. I am a huge fan of stand-up comedy.