The Team in Bologna

The Bologna team: (from left to right) Francesco Ferraro, Giacomo Beccari,

Barbara Lanzoni, Flavio Fusi Pecci

Francesco Ferraro

Francesco R. Ferraro was first intrigued by Astronomy as a child. He was born in 1961 in a small town (Corsano, near Lecce) on the beautiful sea of Puglia but he mostly grew up in Matera, a small city in south of Italy, in the so-called ``Magna Grecia'' area, a region full of ancient history of the Greek colonization. Naturally his initial main interest was Archeology. While he was collaborating with an amateur Archeologist group, there was an amateur astronomy group working next door to the Archeologists. The curiosity which led him to look in at next door's meetings was fatal: after many years of freezing nights spent following luminosity variability of nearby variable stars, he started to study Astronomy at the Bologna University where he earned a PhD degree in Astronomy. After a Post-Doc in Germany (at the European Southern Observatory) he was researcher at the Bologna Observatory and he is now full professor at the Astronomy Department of the Bologna University. Ferraro's principal field of investigation is the study of stellar evolution and stellar population in old stellar systems. His astronomical work is based on observations made with telescope on the Earth (mainly European Telescopes in Chile) and in space (Hubble Space Telescope). Thus at the end he has finally succeeded in reconciling both his passions indulging in an Astro-Archeology approach to the problem of the formation and the evolution of our Galaxy, via the systematic study of the oldest known fossils of that remote epoch: the Galactic Globular Clusters. Since his initial hobby became his vocation, he has turned his interest toward figurative art and currently enjoys painting.