I have always been fascinated by things I don't understand, and Physics is one of those subjects in which to find many that are not understood yet. But ordinary Physics did not give me a thrill, so after my Bachelor's degree in physics earned in Pisa, I got into Astrophysics to spice it up with non ordinary environments. Astroparticle Physics did an even better job than Astrophysics by opening a window to the most exotic environments that I could possibly imagine, and providing a vast playground for phenomenological studies.
I got my master's degree at the University of Pisa with a thesis on Intergalactic Magnetic Fields inferred by studying their effect on the propagation of gamma-rays (and secondary electromagnetic particles produced in the photon-photon pair production) coming from an high-energy-peaked BL-Lac object (HESS J1943+213) under the supervision of Dr. Paolo Da Vela (University of Innsbruck). In that work, I increased the existing lower limit by about an order of magnitude, also depending on the hypotheses, and I presented my work at the JETS 2021 and ICRC 2021 conferences.
Later on, I obtained a 6 month grant in applied Physics to study the tyre-pavement interaction, and I have been co-author of a conference paper, without ever losing contact with my astrophysical side.
Now I'm back to Astrophysics and I plan to study high-energy photons again, but this time the x-ray polarisazion from spinning magnetized compact objects to see what they are up to.
When I have some free time I also like to bring science out of the office to share the fun with non experts in outreach activities that I performed also as an undergrad with students' associations.