about me

I was born one autumn day of last millennium, in a wonderful medieval town at the foot of the Italian Alps. My mom, Emma, taught me curiosity and determination. My brother Ivan instilled in me ambition and passion, while Fulvio gave me the power of self-derision.

I've been a terrible child, resistant to any form of constriction and indoctrination. I grew atheist when I realised the church was deprived of self-critique. I've been fascinated by science, philosophy and education. Curiosity and bad memory have provided me eternal wonder.

I've always enjoyed my work, and had the opportunity to change its course during the years, which has forced me to be always challenged and in need to learn. I have a very weird mix of background and experiences, very loosely connected, which make me a non-expert in about any field I have worked on.

Yet, I am publishing on what I do, and you can find my weird list of publications online.

In my professional career I've been involved in space operations, early design of human Mars missions, training for spacewalks and robotics operations, design of instructional systems, train the trainer courses.

More recently training for team safety and effectiveness in space analogue and safety critical environments and preparing astronauts to pick the best geological samples in future planetary exploration endeavours using analogue earth environments.

Nowadays my major occupation is indeed designing training and instructional systems for effective teamwork in expeditions and space exploration, like the CAVES & PANGAEA training courses, the CAVES-eXpeditions and the PANGAEA-eXtension test campaigns. My trainees are astronauts, flight controllers and Antarctic over-winterers. My collaborators some of the best European planetary scientists, explorers and speleologists.

I tend to share on these topics on twitter @ESA_CAVES and now also on the ESA CAVES blog, and on youtube.

I love biomimicry, cradle to cradle, permaculture and sustainable design. I believe these methods could be changers in sustainable space exploration. They inspired a series of thoughts always in incubation. They have inspired the ESA ECOSAT project, which has been an early precursor to the ESA Clean Space initiative, and to Spaceship EAC.

Well, to tell the truth I've also been involved in some additional parallel projects: like transforming some of the lessons of the ESA Shenanigans 2009 Basic Training into online video educational material, the first being published is the Soyuz Launch Sequence Explained, the second the Soyuz Undocking Re-entry and Landing Explained.

In my free time I go caving. Th best? in 2014 I joined an expedition of the La Venta Exploring team, in the lost world of Venezuelan Tepuis. In the underworld you meet fantastic people.

I have, indeed, a fantastic job, or better a series of fantastic opportunities to work with fantastic people and learn at the same time. I am still wondering how I got there.