GREETINGS

in Italian   

It is with great pleasure and honour that I welcome all the participants
to this important international conference in which the greatest representatives of the world of neuroscience are united.

When Professor Mai and Professor Caltagirone offered me the chance to organise today's conference in this building, I accepted with great enthusiasm in the name of the entire Board of Directors, knowing how much this initiative is in complete syntony with the Santa Lucia Foundation's whole strategy. The institute was in fact created more than 40 years ago for neuro-rehabilitation purposes and has over time increasingly concentrated its interests on the operational integration of clinical and basic research throughout the neurosciences. In addition, it has developed numerous laboratories in the sectors of clinical and behavioural neurology and neuropsychology, neuromotor physiology and neurophysiopathology, and pre-clinical experimental neurosciences and neuroimaging.

We are proud, moreover, to open the conference on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the Foundation's being recognised as one of the 32 institutions classified by the competent Ministries of Health and of Scientific Research as Scientific Institutes for Research, Hospitalisation and Health Care. Their goal is to seek to transfer scientific knowledge to the clinical field as effectively as possible.

The pleasurable task taken on by the Foundation of organizing the Conference goes hand in hand with the imminent opening here, both structurally and operationally, of the European Brain Research Institute, which was conceived of and sought by our Nobel Prize winner, Professor Rita Levi Montalcini. As you will most probably know, the aim of the EBRI too is to concentrate European and extra-European neuroscientists in a single structure so as to be able to optimise neuroscientific research in an attraction pole conceived of as a new meeting place.

There is therefore no better occasion than this conference, in which more than 50 scientists from all over the world are to seek to combine their interdisciplinary knowledge and experience, for formulating a "common language" of neuroscientific knowledge, which is an indispensable starting point for harmonious and fruitful development.

Leaving to all of you, then, this demanding but fascinating task of "opening" the many doors still closed in this Wunderkammer which is the human brain, I again offer you a sincere welcome and wish you all the best in your work and a pleasant stay in the city of Rome.

General Director Dott. Luigi Amadio of Santa Lucia Foundation