This picture was taken by Sergio Bittanti at the celebration of the 50-th anniversary of IFAC in Heidelberg on September 15, 2006. It features a group of Italian participants; from left: Guido Guardabassi, Claudio Melchiorri, Patrizio Colaneri, Claudio Bonivento, Alberto Isidori and their wives, Edoardo Mosca.

Heidelberg, a view of the Castle, where the Conference banquet was held . Below, the speach given by Alberto Isidori, incoming IFAC President (2008-2011), on this occasion.

Dear friends, distinguished colleagues.

It is a great honour for me to speak here tonight, on behalf of the NMO of Italy, the nation that will host the 2011 World Congress of IFAC.
Today is the day of the 50th anniversary celebration and the first thing I wish to do is to invite you to thank Rolf Isermann for his efforts in organizing this event.
As we have heard this morning, this is an occasion to review our past and to plan our future. Automatic Control has a long tradition in Italy, that dates back more or less to the times at which IFAC was conceived. As a matter of fact, one of the 8 national conferences that had been held in 1956, as mentioned this morning by Steve Kahne, was held in Milan, under the auspices of the National Research Council of Italy, the organization that eventually became the NMO of Italy. And exactly this coming Monday Sergio Bittanti will host, in Milan, a conference whose purpose is to celebrate the 50th anniversary of that event Also today, in Steve's talk, have heard that the second meeting of the Executive Board of IFAC was held in Italy (Steve showed a nice group picture of this event, and in the caption we could read "Rome, 1958"). As you might have seen from the booklet that that we produced 4 years ago (and that - as we can see today from the documents distributed at the registration - is setting a standard which is being followed by an increasing number of NMOs), we in Italy treasure very much our tradition of involvement and contribution to IFAC. For many of us, IFAC events have been the first opportunity for interaction with the international scientific community. This was indeed the case for myself, as the first international conference I ever attended (and in which I presented a paper) was the IFAC world congress in Warsaw in 1969. This occurred after an adventurous and a long two-day drive from Rome, with my wife, on our small FIAT car. Soon after, the IFAC family adopted me. First through participation in Technical Committees (I remember having attended the first meeting of the newly established TC on "Mathematics of Control", held in Udine in 1975 after a rather disastrous earthquake that had struck the region only a couple of week before). Later I became involved in more and more active roles. Then, same 40 years since my first timid step info the IFAC world, the unthinkable has happened: I am here to invite you to attend the 2011 world Congress in Milano. Italy is very proud of having been selected as the nation hosting the 2011 World Congress. We view this as the acknowledgement at a heritage of excellence, dating back to the pioneering vision of people such as professors Evangelisti, Quazza and Ruberti. The tradition of excellence that they have established continues until the present day. If I recall correctly, Italy provided the second largest national set of delegates to the 2005 World Congress in Prague. The success of our bid for the 2011 Congress was made possible only because a small number of volunteers, most at which are here tonight, have relentlessly pursued this dream in the past years. I would like to acknowledge all of them: Guido Guardabassi, Sergio Bittanti, Edoardo Mosca, Claudio Bonivento, Roberto Tempo, Patrizio Colaneri. It may seem a little bit premature to extend you an invitation to Milan: we will do it later at the appropriate time. But is not premature to say that the preparatory work has already begun. Under the leadership of Sergio Bittanti, the General Chair of the Congress, the organizing committee is already at work and I feel guaranteed, and all of you who know Sergio will feel the same, that an impeccable and memorable event will take place.