Paolo obtained his degree in Physics at the University of Milan, Italy in 1979. In 1980 he moved to the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (Cambridge, MA, USA) as a research fellow. In 1982 he joined the EXOSAT Observatory team at ESOC in Darmstadt, Germany where he worked as Duty Scientist. At the end of the EXOSAT operations he moved to ESTEC, Noordwijk, The Netherlands with the rest of the EXOSAT group. In 1991 he joined the ESIS team as the ESIS Senior Scientist. His scientific background is mainly in X-ray astronomy and archival research. He has published many scientific papers on Active Galactic Nuclei, in particular BL Lac objects and on astronomical surveys. He contributed in a fundamental way to the development of the EXOSAT database system. In July 1995 he joined the SAX team as the SAX-SDC Scientific manager