Are we at the dawn of quantum - gravity phenomenology ?

A handful of recent papers has been devoted to proposals of experiments capable of testing some candidate quantum-gravity phenomena. These lecture notes emphasize those aspects that are most relevant to the questions that inevitably come to mind when one is exposed for the first time to these research developments: How come theory and experiments are finally meeting in spite of all the gloomy forecasts that pervade traditional quantum-gravity reviews? Is this a case of theorists having put forward more and more speculative ideas until a point was reached at which conventional experiments could rule out the proposed phenomena? Or has there been such a remarkable improvement in experimental techniques and ideas that we are now capable of testing plausible candidate quantum-gravity phenomena? These questions are analysed rather carefully for the recent proposals of tests of space-time fuzziness using modern interferome-ters and tests of dispersion in the quantum-gravity vacuum using observations of electromagnetic radiation from distant astrophysical sources. I also briefly discuss other proposed quantum-gravity experiments, including those exploiting the properties of the neutral-kaon system for tests of quantum-gravity-induced decoherence and those using particle-physics accelerators for tests of models with large extra dimensions. The emerging picture of " quantum-gravity phenomenol-ogy " suggests that we are finally starting the exploration of a relatively large class of plausible quantum-gravity effects. However, our chances to obtain positive (discovery) experimental results still depend crucially on the magnitude of these effects; in particular, in most cases the level of sensitivity that the relevant experiments should achieve within a few years corresponds to effects suppressed only linearly by the Planck length.