I am not sure whether these short presentations of the scientific and cultural trajectories of RSAI Fellows could be of any use or inspiration for younger scholars in regional science. In fact, as Dante meant with his Comedy, in societies there is no hero but anyone is the hero of his own story. Nevertheless, I trust the interpretation of market demand by the editors of our Newsletter that have asked this since many years. (Editors: we believe everyone has enjoyed reading these research autobiographies!) The beginning of my research was not about regional issues but in a related field: industrial structure, market power, technological progress and innovation. But soon, discussing with my friend and, at that time, research partner Riccardo Cappellin, I felt a fatal attraction towards regional and urban issues and decided that my work should have been embedded into a wider theoretical dimension, that of space and ‘territory’. Interpreting interregional imbalance and the why and how of the existence of cities since history is there; and how human action does not inscribe itself into geography and history but molds geography and history themselves, or reacts unpredictably to the limits imposed by them. Methodologically, I felt that theory and conceptualization should come first with respect to formalization and empirical testing and that these four steps should always come together sometimes and integrate each other. Moreover, I found disturbing and even harmful the conflict between formalised, stylised approaches and not-formalised, conceptual ones, both lacking their necessary counterpart, and the idea of a necessary convergence between the two became a continuous logical fil rouge of my research. As early as 1980, I defined economic space as ‘relational’ in nature: “the set of functional and hierarchical relationships that happen on geographical space” (later on, I added social and even identitarian relationships). The necessary formalization and testing of this idea came two decades after, with the concept of ‘territorial capital’, namely “the set of local assets – material and immaterial, natural and artificial, public and private, cognitive, cultural and social – that constitute the competitive advantage and the attractiveness of places”; this was achieved through the construction of an ideal production function with heterogeneous capital assets, when the immaterial ones were increasingly made available by statistics at the regional level. In the early stage of my career (the 1980s) I built models of innovation diffusion (robotics) explaining inter-regional time and spatial lags, and worked with regional input-output tables. I was able to show how the construction of a large transport infrastructure, the Autostrada del Sole linking Italy’s northern and southern parts in the early sixties, destroyed most of the handicraft production in light industries (clothing, furniture, food) of the south, challenged by northern mass production, while at the same time national economic policy was building huge capital intensive plants in heavy industries, creating the deficit in trade balance of the Mezzogiorno and its difficult employment equilibrium that persisted ever since. Building the first I-O table for an Italian region, Sardinia – an island, where external movements of goods are traced by ports and airports statistics – I showed how a ‘smart’ and integrated tourism investment like the Aga Khan’s in Costa Smeralda in the 1970s, encompassing infrastructure, hotels and villas, an airport, an air company and a shipyard, was comparatively the best for that area. With Roberta Capello at the ERSA Conference in Porto, 2004 Moreover, in the same years, a relevant effort was paid to the construction of mathematical ecology and spatial self-organisation models, linked to precise theoretical and empirical questions. A prey-predator urban dynamics model interpreted the interaction between urban profits (the prey) and land rent (the predator), giving rise to urban life-cycles; a different, self-organisation dynamic model of an urban system - where a stochastic, Schumpeterian innovation element replaced the usual, deterministic export-base element - showed that, for the emergence of a full urban hierarchy in presence of agglomeration costs à la Alonso, increasing net returns to urban scale are crucially needed. This last model (1986), fully elaborated in cooperation with a mathematician, Giorgio Leonardi, and a planner, Lidia Diappi (interdisciplinarity matters!) supplied largely the basis for many subsequent theoretical and econometric advancements in urban economics, achieved recently by the team of regional scholars in our research group at Politecnico di Milano. The years 1985-2000 were mainly devoted to the construction of the milieu innovateurs theory, an evolutionary approach to the development of local production systems realized by an international group of scholars gathered by Philippe Aydalot at Sorbonne in Paris,