[1] He was born in Naples in 1929: the son of a glass craftsman, he had lost his mother in 1941 and had done a little bit of everything, even the kitchen boy and the porter, to help run the family.

Graduated in medieval history, and subsequently in literature at the Federico II University of Naples, in 1956 he won a scholarship, made available by the Italian Institute for Historical Studies, of which he would later become secretary.

He has been president of the Neapolitan Society of Homeland History since 1980; member of the scientific council of the Higher School of Historical Studies of San Marino.

In this office he was the author of a series of ministerial decrees that imposed restrictions on various landscape assets (so-called "galassini"): he subsequently gave this administrative complex a more solid legislative foundation than that offered by the previous Bottai law of 1 June 1939, no.

Galasso also carried out an intense journalistic activity, as a columnist and protagonist of cultural debates: among many, that of April 2007 in the "Corriere della Sera" around the homologation of the Risorgimento - and then of the Rinascimento - as an ante -litteram, which he clearly rejected.