I began my doctoral training in 2000 at the University of Milan, where I also completed my degree, and I moved to Lisbon in 2005. I am currently a researcher in Contemporary History at the Centre for Research and Studies in Sociology (CIES-Iscte), University Institute of Lisbon. Representation in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe (with a brief excursion into the twenty-first century) is the main theme of my research, situated within contemporary history and the history of society and political institutions in contemporary Europe. The citizen–state relationship is examined in terms of how political inclusion is governed and how legitimacy is produced, within a sustained comparative focus on Italy and Portugal. Representation is treated both as an institutional practice and as a political language, and its transformations are traced across regime change. This overarching theme is articulated through three interconnected lines of research. First, the citizen–state relationship under fascism and Salazarism—and, more broadly, under authoritarian regimes—is analysed through the ways corporatist and “organic” representation redefined participation, weakened electoral mediation, and claimed legitimacy through functional representation. The construction of consent and propaganda within the Portuguese New State is examined alongside the institutional reconfiguration that accompanied the fascist takeover in Italy, with attention to both ruptures and lines of continuity in institutions, political language, and representative practices. Second, the transition from liberal regimes to mass democracy in Italy and Portugal is examined through suffrage expansion—from electorates confined to a narrow minority to universal suffrage—and through its effects on the representative link. The political and institutional reasons for delay and resistance are reconstructed, together with the ways a broader electorate altered relations between MPs and constituencies, reshaped mediation and accountability. The analysis draws on electoral processes, parliamentary biographies and social profiles, and transcripts of parliamentary sessions, linking conflicts over inclusion to the collapse of democratic experiments in the 1920s and to the institutional options that followed. Resurgent anti-liberal currents in contemporary Europe are the third line of my research, examined in a long-term perspective and with particular attention to the Italian and Portuguese cases. I analyse how anti-liberal claims are framed through identity and moral language, how they are directed at specific audiences, and how they interact with inherited institutional settings and with longer traditions of illiberal and authoritarian thought. Since 2024, I have also focused on developing digital-history methods that support large-scale work on serial sources and institutional corpora, using controlled and reproducible procedures for data collection, organisation, and analysis. This work is supported by additional training in data-oriented approaches, including a minor/master pathway in data science at the University of Venice. Among my principal publications are Ai confini del fascismo: Propaganda e consenso nel Portogallo salazarista (1932–1944) (FrancoAngeli, 2007) and “Le destre radicali e il liberalismo portoghese: alle radici di una dittatura” (Memoria e Ricerca, 2009); the chapters “Corporatism and Italian Fascism” (2019) and “The Constitutional Foundations of an Ethical State: The Portuguese New State in Comparative Perspective” (2019); “Italy between Liberalism and Democracy: Universal Suffrage and the 1913 Elections” (Modern Italy, 2025); the monograph Eclipsed by Democratic Revolution: The Rise of the Mass Parties, Liberal Italy and the Fascist Dawn, 1919–1924 (Cambridge University Press, 2025); and “Fratelli d’Italia, Christian identity, and claim–audience congruence” (European Politics and Society, 2026), doi:10.1080/23745118.2026.2616373.

University/Institution	Type	Degree	Period
Cà Foscari Department of Environmental Sciences, Informatics and Statistics - Italy - Venice	Post-graduation	Computer and Data Science	2024 - 2024
Iscte Portugal - Lisboa	Post-graduation	Data Analysis in Social Science	2011 - 2013
University of Milan Italy - Milan	PhD	History of Society and Institutions in Contemporary Europe	2005
Faculty of Political Science - University of Milan Italy - Milan	Licenciate	Political Science with a specialization in Public International Law	2000

Artificial Intelligence, Crisis of Democracy, Fascism, Populism, Authoritarianism

Political Science Social Sciences

History and Archeology Humanities