BIOGRAPHY

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is a Senior Lecturer on Medieval and Renaissance Cultural history at the Warburg Institute, School of Advanced Study, University of London. 

His teaching work includes contributions to the MA in Cultural Intellectual and Visual History. He is involved in examinations more generally, as well as advising on dissertations and tutoring students. He also supervises and co-supervises PhD students, and occasionally acts as examiner of external PhDs. 

He teaches and lectures outside of the Warburg Institute in a variety of contexts. He helps to organise international conferences and seminars, and he gives specialist advice to external bodies, including publishers and government bodies, and he also peer reviews for a range of scholarly publications and research organisations. For many years he has run several series of public readings of Dante, including for school children both in Italy and the UK.

Alessadro has carried out research on medieval and early modern sacred geography, in particular on the notion of a paradise on earth and its mapping in the Western tradition. His fields include the history of cartography, pilgrimage, and utopian thought. He has worked on literature on journeys to the otherworld and cultural interchange in the early modern age, focusing on the relationship between the Italian and Hungarian Renaissances and on the Dante and Aeneus Sylvius Piccolomini. 

His main current research project is on medieval and Renaissance ideas about the perfect condition of Adam and Eve before the fall.