Two important events marked the year 2006 in the still short history of evolutionary developmental biology. The first European Workshop on Evolutionary Developmental Biology, held in Venice on 5–6 May 2006, offered some 30 researchers from most of the European teams active in this field a timely perspective on key issues in the discipline, and opened a lively discussion on where to move next, in terms of problems, model organisms, and levels of investigation. The second event was the Founding Congress of the European Society of Evolutionary Developmental Biology, held in Prague on 16–19 August 2006, which was attended by more than 300 biologists from all over the world.

This book is based on a selection from the papers contributed to the Venice workshop, plus five additional essays expressly written for this work.

The Venice workshop was generously sponsored by the Istituto Veneto di Scienze Lettere ed Arti and hosted in the wonderful Palazzo Cavalli-Franchetti. We are very grateful to Leopoldo Mazzarolli, the President of the Istituto, for sympathetically offering this academy's spaces for the first evo-devo event at European scale; our sincere thanks are also extended to Alessandro Franchini, Antonio Metrangolo, and to the whole technical staff of the Istituto for steadily helping in the organization of the meeting.

The book has benefited from the enormous help provided by numerous colleagues in reviewing more or less advanced drafts of the chapters.