BA in Oriental Languages and Literatures at Venezia Ca' Foscari (1988), PhD at Napoli L'Orientale (1996). He studied at Hebrew University in Jerusalem under the direction of M.J. Kister (1993-94), and then taught in Turin (1999-2002) and Naples L'Orientale since 2002, where he has been full professor in Islamic studies since 2011 and Rector since November 2020. He has been Visiting Researcher/Professor at Princeton University (2014), Harvard (2015), EHESS Paris (2016), Institute for Advanced Study Tokyo (2018), University of Pennsylvania (2019) and member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 2016-17. Since 2019 he has been PI in the European project ERC-Synergy EUQU (The European Qur'an - cPI Mercedes Garcia-Arenal, Cisc, Madrid, PIs John Tolan, Nantes, Jan Loop, Canterbury). He is a member of the Accademia dei Lincei, the Italian National Academy.
He has carried out research on biblical prophets in Islam (Biblical prophets in the Islamic tradition, Brescia, 1999, English translation 2002), he has dealt with Islamic literature in general and, more recently, with editions and translations of the Qur’an in the modern age (Ludovico Marracci at Work, written with R. Glei, Wiesbaden, 2016). He has translated several texts of Islamic literature into Italian (Malik, al-Muwatta'. Manual of Islamic Law, Turin, 2011, with which he won the King Abdullah ibn Abdulaziz International Award for Translation, 8th Section. 2015) and has edited works on Islam in the West (Routledge Handbook of Islam in the West, London, 2015, 2nd ed. 2022) or on the history of Islamic civilization (The Wiley Blackwell History of Islam, Hoboken, 2018, edited with A. Salvatore, B. Rahimi). He has recently published an introduction to Islam (it. ed. 2018, engl. dd.: Islam: an advanced introduction, London – New York 2022) and on the Qur’an and Qur’anic studies (it. ed. 2021, eng. Ed.: The Qur’an: a guidebook, Berlin, 2023).