I was born nearly sixty years ago in Milan. My father was a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Politecnico di Milano. For this reason, I grew up 200 meters away from the main building of the University where I now work. My primary school was (and still is) in the same square of the Politecnico, and during my childhood, I spent my afternoons in spring riding my bike with my little friends around the campus square. If someone had told me in those days that I would have got a position at that University, I would have just laughed. The campus square with the primary school on one side Politecnico di Milano’s main building on the other of the campus square My contact with the academic world started when I was a child. I liked visiting my father’s office, looking at the “grown-up students” with admiration and looking at the “magic” events that were taking place during my visits to the technical laboratories. During my primary school years, I also got in contact with the “1968 students’ revolution”. In Milan, the Politecnico’s square was, unfortunately, a place of fights between students and police. For me, the bad side of that historical moment was that I was confined at school, waiting for the situation to improve and for my parents to pick me up. 1968, in the campus square after a day at school. When the time to choose the University course of study came, it was not easy. I had clearly in mind what I did not want to become, and instead, I had no idea of what I wanted to become. After deep reflections and a certain influence on people thinking practically, I preferred to choose a course of study with better job opportunities. My choice was Economics at Bocconi University in Milan. The doubts were so significant that made me apply on the afternoon of the deadline. My love for Regional Economics came during my last year when I decided to attend this course. I was deeply fascinated by how space is inextricably bound up with economic activity. Regional Economics has been the only course in all my student career where I received a “cum laude” mark and decided to write my dissertation in the field of Regional Economics under the supervision of Roberto Camagni. The day after my graduation, Roberto Camagni asked me if I wanted to help him develop some research projects while I was looking for a highly remunerative job in the private sector. I accepted, and on September 1st, 1986, I started working in the Economics Department at Bocconi University while looking for a stimulating and remunerative job in banks, insurance companies, and large firms, where I had several job interviews. I was offered several opportunities, but none was assessed to be the right one. In 1991, a young and already famous Dutch professor, Peter Nijkamp, met me at a conference and asked me whether I would be interested in doing a PhD at the VU University in Amsterdam. Confronted with such an offer, I understood why I could not find the right job elsewhere. I had already my preferred (even if not highly remunerated) job, and the PhD was the opportunity of my life I was waiting for. In 1991 I started with enthusiasm my studies at the VU in Amsterdam. In December 1993, I received my PhD in Economics at the VU with a thesis entitled “Spatial Economic Analysis of Telecommunication Externalities”, published the following year by Avebury. The personal satisfaction I received from the dissertation and the book was unbelievable, and I still have a vivid memory of the day of the ceremony and the day the book came out. 1993, PhD defense, VU, Amsterdam. I became an assistant professor at Politecnico of Milano two years later, and another turnaround in my life happened. Roberto Camagni left the University of Padua and joined me at the Economics department of Politecnico di Milano. At last, we were both in the same academic environment, a condition that allowed us to build a Regional Science group made of enthusiastic young scientists working with us. Since that year, the number of new and innovative research fields that I had the chance to study multiplied. I still kept my passion for regional innovation models, but I opened my mind to other fields. In my first years at Politecnico, I reinforced my empirical (econometric) expertise, fascinated by the idea of “measuring the unmeasurable”. The industrial atmosphere of the industrial districts (at that time a crucial theory of local development), the collective learning effects of the milieu innovateur theory (an evolutionary approach to the development of local production systems), network externalities of the city network theories, found quantitative proofs of their effects in my studies. In this vein, I also got fascinated by Urban Economics, revisiting all attempts made to measure the presence of agglomeration economies, innovating conceptually also by finding reasons on how to overcome the “Optimal city size theory”, demonstrating that the functions and the capacity of cities to be part of a city system r