He received his Ph.D. in history and civilization from the European University Institute (Florence, Italy). He is a historian of early modern science, specializing in the relationship between scientific instruments and books. He has written articles on subjects as varied as the sole surviving copy of the first biography of Galileo, Robert Hooke’s mechanical model of memory, and Athanasius Kircher’s universal language. Most recently, he has exposed several modern forgeries of seventeenth-century scientific books.