Summary
I am  Associate Professor in Economic History at the Università Ca'Foscari Venezia, Italy. I currently teach economic history for undergraduates, International Economic History in the postgraduate course in Comparative International Relations, and Business History in the PhD in Business. I graduated in History in Venice at Ca'Foscari (1995) and got a PhD in Urban and Rural History in Perugia (1999). I was visiting researcher at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (1998) and at the Institut National d'Etudes Demographiques (1999) in Paris, and at the University of California at Irvine, School of Social Sciences (2000). My research interests stretch from the history of statistics (subject of my PhD dissertation, then published as Le misure del Regno: Direzione di statistica e municipi nell'Italia liberale, Padua, Il Poligrafo, 2001) to business history and urban history. The critical edition of the correspondence between the director of the Italian statistical bureau in the last quarter of the 19thcentury and the main industrialist of the time (Lo statistico e l'industriale: carteggio tra Luigi Bodio e Alessandro Rossi, 1869-1897, Rome, Istat, 1999) was the occasion to shift the focus on business history, dealing with the relationship between the crisis of big business and the development of industrial districts (Lo smalto e la ruggine: domande, documenti, testimonianze sulle Smalterie di Bassano, Castelfranco Veneto, Archeometra, 2002) and then with the development of a multinational network firm (Benetton: I colori del successo, Milan, Egea, 2005). An interest for urban history dates back to the PhD, and is at the origin of a study on the connection between local policy and economic development in a small Italian city (Amministrare lo sviluppo: Bassano del Grappa, 1945-1980, Comitato per la storia di Bassano, 2007). Some raids into early-modern times concerned the demographic history of the Venetian ghetto (with Francesca Trivellato), and ceramic manufacturing in the Republic of Venice. More recently, I edited a special issue of the journal Quaderni Storici, 134.2 (2010) on Statistical Sources for the Economic History of Unified Italy. An article on how businessmen could influence the production of statistical data resulting in a deep regulatory capture was published in the journal Enterprise & Society on June 2011. A survey of the complex relationship between statistical thinking and official statistics in Italy all along the 19th and 20th Centuries has just been published by Einaudi in the Annals of its history of Italy. The connection between quantification and business management in modern times is now my main field of interest. A current research project I am working on together with Marisa Agostini at the Ca' Foscari Department of Management concerns the connection between accounting fraud, managerial succession and business failure. Together with Michael Serruys of Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Miki Sugiura of Tokyo International University, I am also coordinating an international project on gateways and hinterlands in modern Europe. With Michael Serruys I am also working on an assessment of the evolution of the Italian railway network in and geographical and historical perspective. An important study under way concerns industrial privileges in the Republic of Venice: I am working on this issue in the frame of a book on the political economy of family, State and market in the Republic of Venice, together with my colleagues Paola Lanaro at Ca' Foscari and Andrea Caracausi at Padua University.