After four years of service as Observatory Director, Marco Salvati is trying
to make up for the elapsed time, and follows in a sort of "late postdoc" mode
the lines of research explored by his younger collaborators.
Together, this small group works mostly in the field of Active Galactic Nuclei,
exploring their distribution in parameter space (black hole mass, black hole
spin, accretion rate) and their evolution in cosmic time. Since the growth and
activity of the central black hole, on the one side, and the assembly of
the host galaxy, on the other, go very tightly in parallel, the AGN evolution
is a convenient window on the more general problem of the formation of
cosmic structures.