I was born in Florence (Italy), on 5th October 1970, from a German father (which explains the origin of my name) and from an Italian mother, or better said: a Florentine one (which explains my accent, as some say). I'm the older of two brothers.

As a child, I attended the ground school at the Swiss School here in Florence. There, both Italian and German were taught. During that period I had many friends from different countries, which made me interested in travelling.

At high school I concentrated on scientific courses and also learnt English and French.

In 1989 I applied for the Electronics Engineering course at Florence University. Although I specialized in control systems, I have been particularly attracted by electronics and, mostly, by computer sciences.

In 1998 I graduated with summa cum laude degree. My thesis focused on the development of a 3D graphics user interfaces (i.e. non immersive Virtual Reality environments) supporting access to paintings in an image database. The work has been developed at the Visual Information Processing Laboratory of the Computer Science Department under the direction of professor Alberto Del Bimbo.

In 2002 I completed my PhD with a thesis covering different aspects in the development of interactive 3D applications.

After my Ph.D remained at the Dipartimento di Sistemi e Informatica of the Università di Firenze as a research associate until december 2003, when I changed to the Administration of Florence County. I'm still giving some courses at the University of Florence (for more details, please take a look at the teaching section of my web site), and I'm still carrying on some research work.