Personal

After my undergraduate work in Philosophy at the University of Rome, in 1979, at age 25, I moved with my wife Isa to the US, to study linguistics at UMass, Amherst. We ended up staying for 13 years. After getting our degrees, we taught at Brown (1983-1985) and Cornell (1985-1992). Our three children were born during this time - for some strange reason each during the year of a soccer World Cup. We then moved back to Milan, Italy. Not our city, but close enough. 13 must be our number, because that is the period we lived and worked in Milan. In 2005, we moved back to the US, as I took on my current position at Harvard.

All of my work came with a fair amount of suffering. An idle thought I indulge in is what would I do if I could start over. While I am very curious about other fields of inquiry, I don't exclude that I might/would wind up in the same field, in the hope of understanding things a little better.