The main aim of my research is to understand how the brain encodes movements. Motor control has been the main theme of my career, I probably belong to the class of those that Daniel Wolpert would define as motor chauvinist – proudly so. I graduated in Italy for my BSc, I then moved to Cambridge for my MSc and PhD, where I was lucky to be accepted into the Wellcome Trust Four-year PhD programme. I graduated under the supervision of Michael Bate studying motor circuits assembly in Drosophila. After that I became an EMBO fellow in the lab of Silvia Arber in Switzerland. In those years I implemented viral strategies to visualise and manipulate motor circuits in vivo. In the autumn of 2013 I became junior group leader at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology.