After having completed his secondary studies in Parma, his native city, Bianchi attended the Pisa Normal School of Higher Studies under the guidance of Enrico Betti (1823-1892) and Ulisse Dini (1845-1918), graduating in 1877. He then spent two years in Munich and Göttingen, where he had the chance to meet the German mathematician Felix Klein (1849-1925). Upon returning to Pisa in 1881, he was appointed professor at the Normal School, where in the following years he held the Chair of Projective and Descriptive Geometry and that of Geometry in this university, of which he was director from 1918 to the year of his death. For his important contributions in the field of mathematics, and within the sphere of differential geometry and theory of numbers in particular, he was nominated member of the Accademia dei Lincei, the Turin Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society of Naples. His theories on the transformation of surfaces with constant negative curvature are still today considered a milestone in the field of differential geometry. In 1938 the Italian Mathematical Union decided to edit the national edition of his Works, which it published from 1952 to 1959 in 11 volumes, the last of them containing the mathematician's scientific correspondence.