After completing my first degree at the University of Florence, I moved to London to pursue a PhD at University College London, which I completed in 2003. In the same year, I took up a permanent lectureship in Roman History at University College London, where I taught for twenty years and led or participated in several international research projects on a wide variety of subjects (such as, for example, the notion of justice, popular sovereignty, ancient liberty, Roman oratory, cultures of voting, and Roman trials). In 2024, I was appointed Camden Professor of Ancient History at the University of Oxford.

My work focuses on the history of Roman politics and ancient political thought as well as the wider intellectual landscape of the Roman Republic, with a particular interest in oratory and the production of knowledge.

I primarily (but not solely) teach graduate students in Roman history and lecture on the Roman constitution, Roman law, and the intellectual life of the late Republic with a particular focus on Cicero.

What makes the study of ancient history at Oxford unique is the opportunity to explore any aspect of the ancient world that interests you, to attend the most exciting seminars on new discoveries, and to be challenged by new methodologies and historical questions – all while receiving rigorous training in the handling of every kind of ancient source.

I explored and continue to have a strong interest in the conceptualisations of liberty, both in Rome and in different historical contexts of the ancient world, with the aim of shedding light on rival understandings of liberty in antiquity, and on the role that these might play in current thinking about this concept. I have also focused on the development of the notion of individual rights, the idea of popular sovereignty, and the global dimension of ancient democracy as well as its many meanings and forms in different historical contexts. I am currently co-editing the first volume of the Cambridge History of Democracy.

My second area of research concerns the production of knowledge. I have focused my attention on the so-called ‘antiquarians’, scholars who wrote down the previously unwritten political and religious rules and regulations of Republican Rome, at the time of most acute crisis of the Republic. I am leading an ERC project called Ordering, Constructing, Empowering: the Fragments of the Roman Republican Antiquarians (FRRAnt for short), which aims to produce the first ever edition (both in print and digital format) of the fragments of the Roman Republican antiquarians. The first FRRAnt’s co-edited volume Mapping Antiquarian Practices: the Roman Republic and its Hellenistic Context is nearing completion.
I am currently working on a monograph whose subject is closely linked to the reconstruction of antiquarian texts, entitled Politics and the Production of Knowledge in the late Roman Republic: Constitutionalism in a New Perspective. This will present a comprehensive analysis of the development of Roman constitutional thought and practice at the end of the Republic, the time of its formation and major development.