A birthday is the occasion to stop for a moment remembering the past, recollecting what is gone and far and near friends that have been with us for a long or short stretch of the way. Trying to reconstruct that past, Adriano Gozzini's students, collaborators and friends have written the pages of this book. The interaction between electromagnetic field and condensed matter has always been the principal field of Gozzini's interest. In a time of overexaggerated professionality and specialization, in the time of big groups physics, Gozzini remained an individual scientist: as a real follower of the XVIII century natural philosophers, every phenomenon raises his curiosity -- firebee's light and optic bistability, the response of bones to elastic sollicitations and the validity of quantum mechanics.