Born in '76, I had my first rendezvous with video games in 1980, when, during a summer vacation in Holland, I came across an Asteroid arcade. I was only four years old, but I remember well the triangular spaceship and the menacing asteroids shattering and multiplying. For years I continued to draw the spaceships as triangles, capable of flying between the stars and equipped with deadly weapons.

I would like to say that it was love at first sight, but at the time Coin-ops were relegated to bars, environments perceived as unsuitable for young children. So I had to wait until 1983 for my first encounter with computing, in the form of a brand new Commodore 64 that my mother bought for my older sister. I wanted it too, but what I managed to get a videogame, initially, it was only a clone of the 1292 Advanced Programmable Video System produced by Cabel of Curno: the Universal Game Computer.

My first Personal Computer, or at least that's how it was classified by the convincing writing on the box, was a Commodore 16, an incautious purchase of my father, who hoped to save a few liras buying the last, and inferior, model of the company of Tramiel. Within a year my father was convinced of the error and he remedied, buying the Commodore 64 and moving the Commodore 16 on my desk.

Since then I have not (almost) stopped. Whenever economic resources allowed it, a new model entered the house, the previous one ended up in my room and the older one was often scrapped or given to others. Commodore SX-64, Commodore 128, IBM XT, 286, 386, 386 with mathematical coprocessor, 486, Pentium, and so on until entering, as a friend of mine said ironically, the GigaHertz club and then even further.

In 1995 I logged into the Internet for the first time with a 28.8 Kbps modem and, again, my life changed forever.

In addition to computer science, I have always cultivated a passion that, if possible, has meant even more than that for computers and video games: history. In my essays, and very often also in my works of fiction, my unlimited passion for the study of history shines through in the form of quotations to facts, events, or reinterpretation of historical episodes revisited from different angles in circumstances compatible with the real ones.

This is a game that many science fiction writers enjoy, and I couldn't resist the allure of stepping into the role and doing my best. The study of history, for normal people and not for learned academics, is not only to understand our past but also to know who we are and, in a sense, to understand what our future may be. And the latter is one of the purposes of speculative science fiction, one of my favorites.

Of the many works I've read, I think the most significant, which by objective merits and other circumstances have particularly impressed me and influenced the way I write, read, and think, have been these:

• The price of glory, Alistair Horne
• Foundation and Empire, Isaac Asimov
• Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury
• Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Hannah Arendt
• The Keys of the Kingdom, Archibald Joseph Cronin
• Alas Babylon, Pat Frank
• Les Misérables, Victor Hugo
• The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman
• Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur Charles Clarke
• Hitler, Joachim Fest