Dear Readers,

Do you like good food? I would guess the answer is a unanimous yes. But what is “good food”? Here I am afraid we would not have a unanimous answer, although some degree of agreement is expected in some cases. For example, most of you would recognize Italian “lasagne”, French “crepes” and Japanese “sushi” as delicious. However, it all comes down to the personal taste because some others like Scottish “haggis” or French “escargots” or Italian “trippa” which personally I don’t find particularly attractive... Let’s take a globalized, apparently very simple food like pizza. What makes a good pizza? Have you ever tried a wood fired oven baked “pizza margherita” in a typical restaurant in the Naples area? It’s an extremely simple, yet delicious food, and what makes it really fantastic is the combination of a handful of basic ingredients: mozzarella and tomato on a fragrant layer of pizza bread, with a few basil leaves (personally I love to add a few drops of good “extravergine” olive oil). You don’t need many sophisticated or unusual toppings to make a fantastic pizza, just the combi - nation of two or three simple, well-chosen and tasty ingredients. Are you hungry now? If yes, you might want to have a good pizza tonight for dinner, but let me just conclude my thought before heading to a pizzeria. Personally, I am convinced that, like a good pizza comes from simple ingredients cooked in just five minutes, a brilliant idea comes from the combination of few simple and linear thoughts which simultaneously enter your mind at the right moment and come out as a flash of genius. Simplicity is the key, for good food as well as for good ideas! And if you can resist a few more minutes before biting your well deserved pizza, you might want to have a look at this new issue of SYNFORM which is full of tasty and creative chemistry. The first SYNSTORY is about a novel enantioselective organocatalytic cyclization process developed by B.-C. Hong (Taiwan). The second SYNSTORY deals with a synthetically very useful radical cyclization reported by J. Lebreton and F. Dénès (France). Last but certainly not least, the fascinating organometallic synthesis of long helicenes reported by I. Starý (Czech Republic). Enjoy your pizza! Pardon, your reading...

Matteo Zanda
Editor of SYNFORM