If you pay attention to the name underneath our articles, you may be aware of my interest for history. I am an historian by training and education: I spent the good part of the past 15 years elbow deep in Late Antique texts, manuscripts and documents about early saints and oh boy! Call me a nerd but I would not have had it any other way.

However, my love story with history – because of love I should truly talk, believe me – started much earlier than my college years. I was brought up by my grandparents, all born between the middle and the end of the 1910s, in the lovely hills of south-western Piedmont; as a child, it was the tales of their youth that kept me company, the events of the Second World War the first contact I had with history.