Professor of History and Film Criticism at the University of Padua, to which he has been linked since the beginning of his professional life. Throughout this he has participated in various international congresses and symposia and has been Visiting Professor at the universities of Iowa (1986), Princeton (1996) and Chicago (1997), in addition to being a regular at many other university institutions around the world. Director of various collections on cinema in Italy, he has been a contributor for nearly twenty years to the newspaper "La Reppublica", as well as to other literary and film magazines, including "Cinema & Film", "Filmcritica", "Passato e presente", "Segno cinema", "Historical Journal of Film Radio and Television", "Cahiers du Cinéma", "Cahiers de la Cinématèque" or "Artforum". Curator of exhibitions and collaborator of television and radio in programs dedicated to cinema, in 1995 he was appointed Commander of the Italian Republic. His numerous publications include "Roberto Rossellini" (1980), "Cinema perduto" (1981), "Storia del cinema italiano" (started in 1982 and for which he received the Empoli Luigi Russo prize in 1983), "Buio in sala" (1989; Efebo doro prize of Agrigento in 1990), "Cent' anni di cinema italiano" (1991), "Hitchcock" (1995), "Il viaggio dell' icononauta" (1997) or "Gli intellettuali e il cinema" (2004).