Alberto Nocentini has been a professor in glottology and general linguistics at the University of Florence for more than 45 years (a position held by his maestro Giacomo Devoto) and is director of the Centro di Eccellenza in Linguistica. He has published more than 150 works on various linguistic topics: comparison, typology, dialectology, history of language, etymology and the origins of language. These include the manual L’Europa linguistica. Profilo storico e tipologico (2004), the dictionary L’Etimologico. Vocabolario della lingua italiana (2010), the collection of essays Lingua e divenire (2014) published by Le Monnier, and the recent La vita segreta della lingua italiana. Come l’italiano è divenuto quello che è (Ponte alle Grazie, 2015). He is a member of the Accademia della Crusca and co-director of the Archivio Glottologico Italiano, Italy’s oldest magazine on linguistics. He edits the etymological update of the dictionary Devoto-Oli for publishers Le Monnier.