A mathematician from Arezzo, he studied under Corrado Segre (1863-1924), and was awarded a degree in 1900 with a thesis on geometry. After having graduated from the university, he became the assistant of Enrico d'Ovidio (1843-1933) in Turin, then of the renowned Federigo Enriques (1871-1946) at the University of Bologna, and lastly of Eugenio Bertini (1864-1933) at the University of Pisa. In 1904 he was called upon to occupy the Chair of Projective and Descriptive Geometry at the University of Parma, a post he held for only one year, having accepted, in 1905, a Chair at the University of Padua. In 1907, together with Federigo Enriques, he was awarded the Prix Bordin from the Académie des Sciences in Paris. He was a member of numerous Italian and foreign academies, among them the Academy of the Lincei (from 1910) and the Turin Academy of Science (from 1918). After having enrolled in the artillery corps during World War I, he resumed his university career in Rome, where in 1922 he was assigned the Chair of Algebraic Geometry. A supporter of the Fascist regime, he was elected rector in 1923, a post he left in 1925 subsequent to the Matteotti assassination. He was one of the founders of the National Institute of Higher Mathematics in Rome (1938) and published over 400 articles and treatises of research in mathematics. Among has multiform contributions should be mentioned those on enumerative geometry, on projective geometry and on algebraic geometry, in particular on the classification of the algebraic surfaces in birational geometry. He died in Rome on December 8, 1961.