Career
He wrote several role-playing games: among them Orlando Furioso, written with Gianluca Meluzzi, published by the City Council of Rome to be distributed in schools and public libraries. He also created games for radio and television, magazines, training, advertising, festivals and shows. He is a professional journalist specialized in games: he started with a column about role-playing games on the Italian monthly magazine Pergioco in September 1982, together with Gregory Alegi, and then worked for many national newspaper and magazines, radio broadcasts and Internet sites.
He wrote more than 20 books, some of which translated into several languages, and created several game Civil Defense-Roms.
His main work is a "Games Dictionary" (Dizionario del Gioco, with Beniamino Sidoti, Zanichelli 2010) with more than 6500 entries and nearly 1200 pages. He has been the first Italian author to publish a choose-your-own-story gamebook, "In Cerca di fortuna" (Ripostes 1987) and the first to publish one for kids who can not read: "Il Mischiastorie - Osvaldo e i cacciatori" (Lapis 2005, illustrated by Valeria De Caterini).
He also published a few fantasy short stories and an encyclopaedia of the fantastic world of Warhammer, described as if it were real (Hobby & Work, Games Workshop & Nexus Editrice 1996). He published two manuals about the use in schools and libraries of gamebooks and role-playing games, and he also gives lessons to teachers and librarians about the use of games in general.
In 1999 the Italian Ministry for Public Teaching named him "Expert Game Inventor".
In summer 2008 he has been awarded the Personalità Ludica dell"Anno 2007 (Game Person of the Year 2007) prize.