Born in Turin on September 21st, 1941, he graduated at Turin University with a dissertation on Economic History. He was an official and a manager of the Association of the metal industrials in Turin, assistant to the Chairman of Federmeccanica and Confindustria. He organized and manages the historical archives of the Association of the metal industrials in Turin in order to create a permanent records center for the history of technics. He is the director of the journal «Le culture della tecnica». He runs for the publishing house Allemandi the collection Archivi di scienza e tecnica. He is the scientific responsible of the Museo della meccanica e del cuscinetto in Villar Perosa. He is member of the scientific committee of the Research Center on Industry and Science Records (Crisis) and of the scientific committee of the Tancredi Foundation in Barolo for the Museo della scuola e del libro per l'infanzia. He is also part of the managing committee of the Online Center for Industry History and Culture: North-Western Project since 1850, a multimedia project organized by the CSI-Piemonte.
Among his most recent publications are: Le feste popolari del capitalismo (Ed. Allemandi); Fascisti nel Paese dei soviet (Ed. Bollati Boringhieri). Storia fotografica di cento anni di industria automobilistica in Italia, con Marco Revelli e Adriana Castagnoli (Ed. Bollati Boringhieri), Torino sotto le bombe (Edizioni del Capricorno), Torino effimera – due secoli di grandi eventi (Edizioni del Capricorno), La nuova Torino, con Alessandro De Magistris (Ed. Allemandi), Quintino Sella (Edizioni del Capricorno), Francesco Faà di Bruno (Edizioni del Capricorno).