Alessio graduated Magna Cum Laude in Chemistry from the University of Florence in 2002. His final year Laurea project was in computational drug design and NMR spectroscopy of matrix zinc metalloproteases with the late Professor Ivano Bertini at the Magnetic Resonance Center (CERM).

In 2002 he was awarded a Gates Cambridge Scholarship to study at Cambridge. His PhD research, under the supervision of Professor Chris Abell and in collaboration with Dr Glyn Williams's biophysics team at Astex Pharmaceuticals, concerned with biophysical and structural studies of protein-ligand interactions and enzyme mechanism.

In 2006 he was awarded a College Research Fellowship to conduct post-doctoral research on biophysical fragment screening and fragment-based drug design, within the framework of two international consortia to develop new drugs against tuberculosis funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the European Union FP6, jointly directed by Professor Abell and Professor Sir Tom Blundell.