About me

I have always been a computer scientist at heart. I started writing software professionally in 1990. My first public talk was at IPISA 97, the Italian Amiga developers conference, where I presented a program that accelerated the Amiga OS graphics library. It required reverse engineering the library to find and replace its algorithms with faster ones, written in assembly language.

That instinct of optimizing things — go deep, find out how things actually work, then improve on them — has driven everything since.

By 1999 I was building dynamic websites and optimizing them for search engines. In 2006 I joined Sems, a leading Italian search agency, as SEO R&D Manager, developing SEO strategies for clients and the methodologies and tools to support them. I left in 2009 to work independently, and in 2020 founded MindSoup, my consultancy, serving mid-size and large companies on search marketing strategy, technical SEO, AI integration, and training.

I have always believed that knowledge in this industry should be shared. Long before conferences were the main venue, I published one of the first Italian SEO guides and contributed actively to online forums where the discipline was being figured out collectively. Since 2006 I have spoken regularly at major Italian conferences on search marketing, SEO, and AI. The tools I build during client work I release as open source on GitHub.

Understanding search engines at a technical level means understanding Information Retrieval and AI — NLP in particular. For me these were never separate fields; studying one always meant studying the others. That matters now. The industry is full of AI noise, and knowing what actually works requires understanding the technology, not just the market.

I'm based in Milan. I lead every engagement personally, working with a select group of collaborators where needed.

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