Early Life and Academic Career
Simoniti was born in Ljubljana as the son of the renowned composer and choir leader Rado Simoniti who had moved to the Slovenian capital from the Goriška region in the 1930s in order to escape the violent policies of Fascist Italianization in the Julian March. Vasko attended the prestigious Classical Lyceum of Ljubljana. He studied at the University of Ljubljana, graduating from history in 1977. After a short period of work in the public administration of the Socialist Republic of Slovenia, he started teaching at the Ljubljana University in 1981. In 1989 he obtained his PhD at the same university and started teaching history of the early modern period of South Eastern Europe.
As a historian, he dedicated himself mostly to the history of Slovene Lands in the early modern period, especially the relations of the Slovene Lands and the Ottoman Empire. He has also written on problems of methodology and epistemology in historical sciences. In the late 1990s, he was the co-author, together with the writer and public intellectual Drago Jančar and journalist and historian Alenka Puhar, of the exhibition "The Dark Side of the Moon" (Slovene: Temna stran meseca) on the authoritarian and totalitarian elements of the Communist dictatorship in the former Yugoslavia, with an emphasis on Slovenia.
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