Italian research at a turning point: an opportunity that cannot be missed.

Italy is undoubtedly a country of great contradictions: a magnificent artistic heritage and a wonderful landscape in constant threat of negligence and bad administration, if not from corruption. Italy has the record of the most ancient university in Europe—Alma Mater Studiorum was established in Bologna about three centuries earlier than the university in Heidelberg—but it is, at the same time, one of the European countries with the lowest investments in research and education. While salaries of professors and technical staff, as well as structural investments for research and teaching activities, are granted by central government and student fees, research activity is mainly supported through calls for projects launched infrequently by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research (MIUR). Local support and collaboration with industries are an additional source of funding, but they are neither comparable to current situations in other countries, nor to the investments in industrial research that characterized the 1950s and 1960s, which was the golden age of our only Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, Giulio Natta.