MicheleMarchesi was exposed to object oriented technology in 1986, when he had the chance to attend the first OOPSLA Conference in Portland, OR. In November of the same year he attended a Smalltalk course at SI in Oslo, Norway. In 1989 he wrote a book on Smalltalk/V (in Italian), later translated by Prentice-Hall without his intervention, and published in 1994, when the described dialect (ST/V286) was totally obsolete :-(
He teaches electric circuits and neural networks at the University of Cagliari, Sardinia, Italy. His (not very updated) Web page is at http://maxwell.diee.unica.it/persone/marchesi/info.html
He still practices Smalltalk a lot, he is interested in OOA & OOD and, from its inception, of course in XP.
Recently, he translated the XP book of KentBeck into Italian (Kent, your prose is easy to read, but difficult to translate!) and organized XpTwoThousand conference.
The best question was about the phrase "primate dominance display". When it took me two paragraphs to explain I realized I had some work to do on my prose. --KentBeck
Man behind the scenes of XpTwoThousand, XpTwoThousandAndOne, XpTwoThousandAndTwo.