Introduction: I remember like if it was yesterday, when one day, when I was 12 years old, I was coming back from School, and I received from my parents the long expected book “Geigen und Geiger” (Violins and Violinists”) by Franz Farga. My eyes caught irretrievably the chapter about Paganini’s Life, which I would read with eager: I was so impressed that I even forgot to do my homework and practice my violin for my violin lesson next day…

That day was the beginning of a long road, which I am still walking along today. Who was Niccolò Paganini, this Magician, admired, feared and also hated by his contemporaries, Composers as Musicians?  Schubert, Schumann, Liszt, Heine, Hoffmann, Grillparzer, Rossini, Brahms… the most important Romantic have been influenced by this violinist, before he suddenly had been considered as “too much virtuoso” for quite 200 years. A personality, covered with myths and legends, who changed the Music world for ever, and who appeared like a comet on the musicians firmament, leaving behind him a long and glowing firetail.

Which is the part of myth and which is reality? Here comes a first chapter, a kind of Introduction of a story which never will leave me alone…