About the Author

I am Professor of Italian and History (affiliate faculty) as well as chairperson of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Boston College where I have taught since 1994. I was born and raised in Manhattan of an Italian immigrant father (from Basilicata, Italy) and an Italian-American (but completely bilingual and bicultural) mother. I have a large family still in Italy and have visited them regularly since 1975.My B.A. (summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) is from from Columbia University (I spent my junior year in Paris and Florence as part of my wonderful Columbia education) . In college I was a French and Italian major, thinking that I would go into international law, but after my junior year abroad, I realized that I liked the "international" part more than the "law" part and so gave up that idea and went on to graduate school in Italian literature, thanks to a full fellowship from Harvard. I finished at Harvard with two graduate degrees, an M.A. and Ph.D. both in the field of Italian literature. I am a former Jesuit priest (in the order for nearly 20 years, starting right after Harvard, 1985-2004) . As part of my long Jesuit formation, I studied philosophy for two years (at the Jesuit Gregorian University in Rome) and theology for four years (at the Jesuit school of theology, Berkeley, California, now part of Santa Clara University) . I, in the process, obtained a further degree, the "licentiate" (i.e., a Master's degree) in church history (also from the Jesuit School of Theology Berkeley) . All of this education has resulted in the thoroughly interdisciplinary way in which I conduct both my teaching and my research. It also resulted in two art exhibitions that I originated and co-curated, "Saints and Sinners: Caravaggio and the Baroque Image" (1999) and "Hope and Healing: Painting in Italy in a Time of Plague, 1500-1800" (2006) .My Harvard doctoral dissertation and initial scholarly career both focused on the field of popular preaching and popular religion, culminating in my 1999 book, "The Preacher's Demons: Bernardino of Siena and the Social Underworld of Early Renaissance Italy" [University of Chicago Press], which won the Marraro Prize for Excellence in Italian Scholarship from the American Catholic Historical Association. My introduction to Bernini and the Baroque (apart from the thoroughly engaging required introductory course at Columbia called "Art Humanities") came during my two-year residence in Rome as a Jesuit, living right next door to the Jesuit mother church in Piazza del Gesù: living in Rome one is simply surrounded by Bernini and his influence and I couldn't help but become fascinated by this multi-talented man who so dominated and so defined Baroque Rome. It is impossible to understand Rome -- the Rome of today -- without understanding Bernini.But I didn't start to study Bernini in earnest until the year 2000, and, aft