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Born in Florence in ’65, I work in social history. In particular, my research interests are directed towards the history of the worker movement (union movement and social democratic parties of the left) and the evolution of social protection policies and welfare systems. More recently, I have been working on issues of social security and insecurity, on the cultural history of collective fears and perception of disasters and catastrophes in the imagination in the contemporary era. Currently I teach and do research in Siena. You can find my “official” pages here.[...]

Why the name “Tau Zero”? In 1970 science fiction writer Paul Anderson published a novel with this title. The story was about a spaceship carrying some fifty men and women who, due to a fault with the engines, are condemned to travel through space at almost the speed of light. Which is to say, according to the theory of relativity, with a tau factor at almost zero. The Leonora Christine then becomes a projectile without brakes, thrown wildly into the unknown in a universe in which the normal laws of nature seem to be no longer valid. Something very similar is happening to our society now at the beginning of the millennium as it advances with great strides towards a future that appears to many anguished and undefined.