A first contribution to the history of Italian SETI

The first seminal paper about SETI, Searching for Interstellar Communications, published in Nature on 19 September 1959, was written by an American author, Philip Morrison, and another Italian, Giuseppe Cocconi. Nonetheless, from then on, for 30 years Italy has not taken part in the research that arose from that article. But in 1990 two Italian guys, Claudio Maccone and Stelio Montebugnoli, met while participating in the Bioastronomy meeting held in Val Cenis, and the history of Italian SETI began. From then on, the contributions by Italian investigators to search for extraterrestrial civilizations have constantly increased, both in number and quality, but so far nobody had tried to tell their history. In 2024, on the occasion of the IAC Milano 2024, a first contribution appeared, in a book written by myself (“Ascoltando l’infinito silenzio. L’Italia e la ricerca delle civiltà extraterrestri”), but which could count on several contributions from the main protagonists of Italian SETI. In this paper I present the main topics covered in the book and the possible future developments of this work.