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After degree in Mechanical Engineering (but I prefer to be called Ingegnere than Engineer) at Politecnico di Bari (It) in 1994, I stayed on for phd in 1997 because the coordinator of the PhD program, a very wise man (Attilio Alto), posed me a “challenging” question (actually, in Barese dialect!): do you want to be a scientist? And I would still not know how to reply today!
Later, I found a tutor who was really enjoying his life also outside his job with tennis (Giuseppe Monno), and I fell in love with his lifestyle.
I felt this was the only job to give me freedom to cultivate my many passions in sport, music, languages, travelling. The phd was on frictional contact problems for gas turbine applications, and since then I have explored many areas of applied research, always with an eye to “challenging” paradoxical enigmatic and open problems in industry or academia, looking for simple solutions.

My PhD was immediately found of importance my the USAF who invited me with a Window on Science program to a tour to the best US Universities and Research Centres (MIT, USAF-AFB Ohio, UC-Berkeley, Purdue) to give seminars on my findings at that time of relevance on the High Cycle Fatigue program by the USAF.
After an extensive stay in Oxford (UK), I was for short time at Univ Southampton, UK, then moved to CNR in Italy and then back Politecnico di BARI.
I have since then spent various periods of study at Harvard, Oxford, Umich, MaxPlanck, Berkeley, but also Brasil, Russia, Ukraine. I also enjoy teaching to my students, even when they are not Nobel candidates, as long as they are full of life and energy.

Now, I am spending a sabbatical leave at Ecole Polytechnique which gives me some free time to work on this project.
I'm a officer of the reserve of the Italian Navy (Genio Navale), and have written about 10^2 papers in “old-style” international journals, some of which I am in the board (but I never understood what practically that means!). I have also tried to attend conferences, or organize myself, but always changing.
I am an admirer of Leonardo, compared to whom I am equally enthusiast in every field, but nowhere as capable as him in any of them!

When I run projects, I generally get more jammed by bureaucracy, than when I work for free, and alone. Most of my results are not outcome of grants, particularly as writing research proposal has something in common with being a Nostradamus!