This reprint volume is in honour of one of the leaders of Italian high-energy physics, Antonino Zichichi, who is now 65 years old. It covers the first part of his activity: the years 1959–1976, probably the most intense of his scientific career. The volume includes reprints of articles and of some published laboratory reports, documenting the extraordinary constancy of Zichichi in a scientific programme which spanned more than a decade and laid the foundations for the subsequent discovery by M Perl of the heavy lepton, HL (now called τ), first proposed and searched for at CERN and Frascati by Zichichi in the early sixties.