Elected in 2018 to the Chair of Law, Culture and Society in Ancient Rome, Dario Mantovani is a legal historian. Born in 1961 in Milan, Italy, after completing his classical studies, he earned a doctorate in law from the University of Pavia (1985), where he returned in 1997 as a professor of Roman law, following stints at the universities of Trento and Parma.
Editor-in-chief of the journal Athenaeum . Studi di Letteratura e Storia dell’Antichità and a member of the editorial boards of several European journals, he has served as president of the International Society for Classical Bibliography since 2025, an organization dedicated to supporting the editing and publication of L’Année philologique.
He has chaired the Centro per la Storia dell’Università di Pavia since 2007 and edited the six-volume collective work *Almum Studium Papiense *.
He founded and has directed Cedant (Center for Studies and Research on Ancient Law) since 2003. Sixteen sessions of the “College of Ancient Law,” each lasting one month, have brought together nearly 250 European and international students and have resulted in a 17-volume collection.
In 2014, he was awarded a Cátedra de Excelencia (Banco Santander) at the Universidad Carlos III in Madrid. As the recipient of a Senior Scholar Fellowship from the University of California, Berkeley (2007), he has served as a visiting professor at the EPHE, the EHESS, Paris-I, and Paris-II, as well as at the Collège de France. He was awarded an ERC Advanced Grant for the Redhis project (2014–2020).
He served as chair of the Scientific Council of the École française de Rome (2021–2024; 2024–2027). At the École française de Rome, he has co-organized, in partnership with the Collège de France, a workshop introducing the sources of Roman law since 2017.
A member of the Istituto Lombardo Accademia di Scienze e Lettere since 2009, the Montpellier Academy of Sciences and Letters, and the Accademia di Scienze e Lettere di Modena (since 2024), he has been a foreign associate of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres since 2016, from which he received the Plottel Prize. Since 2024, he has been a corresponding member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei.