Attracted from a young age to the mysterious and unusual side of history and science, he studied with the famous illusionist and champion of rationality James Randi. Polidoro was the co-founder, together with Piero Angela, Margherita Hack and Umberto Eco of CICAP (Italian Committee for the Control of Pseudo-Scientific Affermations), and is currently the Secretary of the organisation. He also founded CICAP Fest: Festival of the Science of Curiosity, which gathers the top names in science and culture in Padua every year.

A graduate in psychology from the University of Padua, he taught the first and only undergraduate course in the “Psychology of the Unusual” at the Department of Psychology of the University of Milan-Bicocca and now teaches science communication at the Milan Polytechnic and University of Padua. He is a Fellow of the Center for Skeptical Inquiry and is often invited to give talks and seminars in Europe and the United States.

A regular presence on the TV series Superquark, where he explains how and why we believe hoaxes, he has written and hosted specials for Focus TV and has written and hosted numerous popular science programs, including Legend Detectives (Discovery Channel), Eva: the Science Show (Rai 2) and many others.

He is the creator and host of successful podcasts and has a very lively social media activity, where he is followed by more than 500,000 followers. He is the author of 60 books, including Geniale [Genius] (Feltrinelli, 2022), L’Atlante dei luoghi misteriosi dell’antichità [Atlas of the Mysterious Places of Antiquity] (Bompiani, 2020), and Il mondo sottosopra (Piemme, 2019).

He gives engaging popular lectures, both in Italian and English, ranging from the pleasures of curiosity to the investigation of mysteries, from the psychology of the unusual to the scientific method, from the psychology of deception to the telling of historical, scientific and artistic personalities and events. He also holds courses and events related to science, public education, and writing.

On the occasion of the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci’s death in 2019, he made his theatrical debut with the play “I, Leonardo da Vinci”, a thrilling account of Leonardo the man .