Giambattista Consiglio's passion for homogeneous catalysis, C-C bond formation, and stereochemistry

As we asked our mutual friend Giambattista (Gianni) Consiglio to define himself during a sort of scientific interview, he simply told us: ‘I’m an organic chemist interested in the synthesis of small molecules’. This may surprise more than one, considering that he has dedicated his whole scientific life to the study of transition metals, with a strong overtone on polymerization. However, the statement sounds perfectly logical if one considers that the goal of his research was the understanding of mechanistic details of stereoselective transformations of organic molecules induced by transition-metal complexes, and that a polymer is nothing else than the repetition of a small molecule. Indeed, browsing through his more than 150 publications, one central and fundamental topic emerges as fil rouge, that is, the control of stereochemistry in the C C bond formation in metal-mediated reactions.