Born in Milan, Marco Cattaneo earned a degree in physics in 1991, and a few months later joined the editorial staff of Le Scienze as a junior editor. This marked the beginning of a long career in magazines, from the Italian edition of Scientific American, to Mind, a monthly psychology and neuroscience, in 2006. In 2010, the GEDI group appointed him director of National Geographic Italia. Since 2019, he has written a column for Il Venerdì, supplement to La Repubblica, a newspaper he has collaborated with for years.

In over thirty years in the field, he has devoted himself mainly to science, from physics to life sciences to the environment, but has also gained significant experience as a reporter and travel photographer, with pieces published by magazines such as Airone and Meridiani.

He is author or co-author of several books, including Heisenberg e la rivoluzione quantistica [Heisenberg and the Quantum Revolution] (Le Scienze, November 2000); Il Patrimonio mondiale dell’Umanità [Humanity’s Global Inheritance] (3 volumes, with Jasmina Trifoni, White Star, 2002-2004); Le grandi città del mondo [The World’s Greatest Cities] (with Jasmina Trifoni, White Star, 2005). He wrote the afterword to the Italian edition of Stephen Hawking’s Dove il tempo si ferma. The new theory of black holes [Where Time Stops: A New Theory of Black Holes] (Rizzoli, 2016).
He has received national and international awards for journalism, including the Voltolino Prize (2001), the Grand Prix de l’Afjet (2008), a prize of the French Association of Travel Journalists, the Hippocrates Prize of Unamsi (2011), the Capo d’Orlando Prize for Multimedia Communication (2014) and the Portico d’Oro-Jacques Le Goff Prize of the University of Bologna (2019) for disclosure in history.

A frequent guest on television and radio programs, he has deep experience as a lecturer and moderator (in Italian and English) at festivals and public events.