Close-ups

Let’s talk about you: what is your background, what do you teach, and what are your research interests?
I am Associate Professor of Administrative Law and since the early 90s I have taught several courses, not only typically in the area of public law, such as administrative law and constitutional law, but also in other subjects, but always in the part involving my field.
These include maritime law, environmental law, tourism law and town planning law.
I now chair courses in cultural heritage law at the Department of Philosophy of Cultural Heritage and in wildlife administration in the master's degree programme I designed and which is my great passion.

Please tell us more about this passion of yours.
It is a passion about culture, but not only about it.
In fact, it is born as a passion for nature, intended as wilderness, and therefore from a desire to get to know it in all its aspects.
Sometimes I have wondered if I chose the wrong career, and I doubt whether I should have gone into zoology and especially ethology.
But there can also be satisfaction in the legal perspective that my curriculum addresses.
First of all because it is a relatively unknown specialisation among legal experts, a kind of unexplored and therefore somewhat wild area.
Then, because law is not just a subject, but a key to understanding reality. It could be argued that this is only the key to understanding phenomena that are subject to regulation, but, on closer inspection, all phenomena involving man are regulated or follow rules.

Well, is this your passion and where you found What has given you the greatest satisfaction in your career?
Partly yes, the very conception and then the design and now the management of the master's degree in wildlife administration and management is a satisfaction, I kind of consider it my creation because it is a real novelty and it is unique not only in Italy.
And it is going very well both in terms of academic recognition - in this very beginning of the year I received offers to share research projects with the University of Florence, the Accademia dei Georgofili and the University of Barcelona - and in terms of student and institutional recognition.
But perhaps my greatest professional satisfaction is tied to the monograph I wrote on public assets.
I entered a field that the greatest legal experts of all time had written about, I said something new, my thoughts are recorded in the volume “The Science of Administrative Law in the Second Half of the 20th Century” along with the most important scholars among the few mentioned, and last but not least, because of this book I became a professor.

This is your goal, but let’s take a step back: Tell us about your academic path.
It was unusual. After graduating I won a public competition, but I thought I was better suited to be a lawyer. So I took the bar exam.
The exam went very well and one of the committee members asked me to work in his firm.
The owner of the firm was one of the most important scholars of administrative law who, after a while, told me I had a talent for research and encouraged me to study, write and publish.
I studied, wrote, published and then passed the different selections: PhD, researcher, professor.
Basically, I did not plan my career, it depended on several lucky coincidences.