Guido Alfani is Associate Professor of Economic History at Università Commerciale Luigi Bocconi, Milan. An economic and social historian and an historical demographer, he has published extensively on Early Modern Italy and Europe, specialising in the history of famines and epidemics, in economic inequality, and in social alliance systems. He is the author of Calamities and the Economy in Renaissance Italy: The Grand Tour of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2013) and is currently the Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded project EINITE, 'Economic Inequality across Italy and Europe 1300–1800.'