About

The origins

I was born in Volterra, Tuscany, in 1965. At fourteen, I started working as a waiter — and kept at it all the way through law school. That wasn’t just a summer job: it’s where I learned the value of hard work and what it actually takes to earn someone’s trust. Along the way I also picked up English, Spanish, and passable French. German, I’ll admit, never got past the menu.

Training

After a diploma in accounting — which gave me a grounding in how businesses actually run — I earned my law degree from the University of Siena in 1990, with a thesis in criminal anthropology on deviance and aging. It’s a subject far removed from corporate law, but it taught me to read human behavior before I ever read a statute. The year before, an Erasmus exchange had taken me to the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge.

The profession

I completed my legal apprenticeship in Rome and was admitted to the bar in 1994, back when the fax machine was still cutting-edge legal technology. Thirty years later, I work with the internet and artificial intelligence — a shift I’ve lived through firsthand, not watched from the sidelines.

In 1995, I became legal counsel to the Taipei Representative Office in Italy, and two years later to the Embassy of Taiwan to the Holy See. I’ve since guided Italian companies through international expansion — Taiwan has been a constant thread, but so has Panama, where I spent time studying and staying current on regional business practices. I also spent years as in-house counsel for an international IT group, right as digitalization was taking off — and watched SaaS contracts come into existence in real time.

In 2009, I was admitted to practice before Italy’s Supreme Court of Cassation. I’m also a certified Data Protection Officer (Accredia PRV0026, UNI 11697).