His father, who died young, spoke very good German and met his future wife in Germany.
In his childhood and youth, he experienced racist exclusion, for example by classmates and local police officers.
After having finished his Master's degree, he started to work as researcher in Cologne.
In 1996 he graduated at the Institute for Political Sciences and European Issues with a doctoral thesis on German-Italian Relations.
[6] In 2003 Masala was temporarily employed as professor at the University of Munich, and in 2004 he started to work at the NATO Defence College in Rome.