I began my PhD studies in 2000 at the University of Milan, where I also completed my degree, and I moved to Lisbon in 2005. I am currently a researcher in Contemporary History at the Centre for Research and Studies in Sociology (CIES-Iscte), University Institute of Lisbon. Representation in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe (with a brief excursion into the twenty-first century) is the core theme of my research, situated within contemporary history and the history of society and political institutions. I examine the citizen–state relationship in terms of how political inclusion is governed and how legitimacy is produced, within a sustained comparative focus on Italy and Portugal. Representation is treated both as an institutional practice and as a political language, and its transformations are traced across regime change. This agenda is articulated through three interconnected lines of research. First, I analyse the citizen–state relationship under fascism and Salazarism—and, more broadly, under authoritarian regimes—through the ways corporatist and “organic” representation redefined participation, weakened electoral mediation, and claimed legitimacy through functional representation. I examine the construction of consent and propaganda within the Portuguese New State alongside the institutional reconfiguration that accompanied the fascist takeover in Italy, with attention to both ruptures and lines of continuity in institutions, political language, and representative practices. Second, I study the transition from liberal regimes to mass democracy in Italy and Portugal through suffrage expansion—from electorates confined to narrow minorities to universal suffrage—and through its effects on the representative link. I reconstruct the political and institutional reasons for delay and resistance, and the ways a broader electorate altered relations between MPs and constituencies, reshaped mediation and accountability, and accelerated political professionalisation. This work draws on electoral processes, parliamentary biographies and social profiles, and transcripts of parliamentary sessions, linking conflicts over inclusion to the collapse of democratic experiments in the 1920s and to the institutional options that followed. Third, I examine resurgent anti-liberal currents in contemporary Europe in a long-term perspective, with particular attention to the Italian and Portuguese cases. I analyse how anti-liberal claims are framed through identity and moral language, how they are directed at specific audiences, and how they interact with inherited institutional settings and longer traditions of illiberal and authoritarian thought. I also develop digital-history methods that support large-scale work on serial sources and institutional corpora, using controlled and reproducible procedures for data collection, organisation, and analysis. This work is supported by additional training in data-oriented approaches, including postgraduate study in data science at the University of Venice. Among my principal publications are Ai confini del fascismo: Propaganda e consenso nel Portogallo salazarista (1932–1944) (FrancoAngeli, 2007) and “Le destre radicali e il liberalismo portoghese: alle radici di una dittatura” (Memoria e Ricerca, 2009); the chapters “Corporatism and Italian Fascism” (2019) and “The Constitutional Foundations of an Ethical State: The Portuguese New State in Comparative Perspective” (2019); “Italy between Liberalism and Democracy: Universal Suffrage and the 1913 Elections” (Modern Italy, 2025); the monograph Eclipsed by Democratic Revolution: The Rise of Mass Parties, Liberal Italy and the Fascist Dawn, 1919–1924 (Cambridge University Press, 2025); and “Fratelli d’Italia, Christian identity, and claim–audience congruence” (European Politics and Society, 2026).