He was born in Viterbo on October 15^th, 1964, he’s an Air Force pilot and was selected by the Italian Space Agency in 1998. In 2002, he took place in the Italian Marco Polo mission aboard a Russian Soyuz TM-34 capsule, where he was the first European to be appointed as pilot. He took the same flight in 2005, aboard the Soyuz TMA-6 for another Italian mission, Eneide.  He came back to space for the third time in 2011 with the second-to-last mission of the STS-134 shuttle, on the Endeavour shuttle. The mission, known as DAMA, fell within the group of the Italian Space Agency missions for the ISS; such missions are the result of an agreement with the NASA for the supply of the logistic modules. The mission has the task of installing the AMS-02 dark matter and antimatter detector on the International Space Station.