This volume of Horticultural Reviews is dedicated to Professor Guglielmo Costa in recognition of his contributions to horticulture and horticultural research both in Italy and throughout the world.

Professor Costa was born in Bologna, Italy. Most of his professional life was undertaken at Alma Mater Studiorum, University of Bologna. His wife, Roberta, also comes from Bologna, where they raised their three children. He has now retired to remain there. Professor Costa is therefore a true citizen of Bologna, and he is immensely proud of his home city. However, he is not parochial and has professional contacts and friends throughout the world, where he is universally known as Mimmo.

Professor Costa graduated (Laurea) in Agriculture (Crop Science) from the University of Bologna in 1969 with marks of 110/110 cum laude, an outstanding result equivalent to 1st Class Honors. In 1971, he was appointed Assistant Professor in Fruit Science, University of Bologna; was promoted to Associate Professor in 1983; and then became Full Professor (Professore Ordinario) of Fruit Science at the University of Udine, Italy, in 1986. At Udine, he soon became a charismatic team leader and served as Head of Department and Director of the Experimental Agricultural Farm. He transferred back to the University of Bologna as Full Professor of Fruit Science in 1997 and retired, 18 years later, at the end of 2015. At Bologna, he did much to maintain and enhance that university’s reputation as an Italian center of excellence in horticultural research and teaching. He was also active in promoting international cooperation in education. The most outstanding example of this involvement is the International Masterate in Horticulture (IMaHS – International Master Course in Horticultural Science), an Erasmus Mundus European Union project now involving eight universities in five European countries. Getting cooperation and agreement between so many institutions of differing academic traditions and practices must have been a real challenge.

Professor Costa may have what, at first sight, appear to be extraordinarily diverse research interests with a prodigious output of scientific papers: more than 90 in peer‐reviewed international journals, several hundred technical publications, and a large number of conference presentations and related proceedings. His publications include about 90 papers in at least 40 different volumes of Acta Horticulturae – a record most unlikely to be matched by any other member of the International Society for Horticultural Science (ISHS). While doing this, he maintained a heavy teaching load involving both undergraduate and postgraduate teaching. He was thesis supervisor of 61 graduate students and 18 PhD students.

In his research, there have been two common underlying themes: practical pomology and a determination to be of real assistance to fruit growers and the fruit‐growing industries of the Emilia‐Romagna Region and Italy as a whole. He has therefore developed strong connections with all parts of the fruit industry, including nurseries, growers, packhouses, and companies supplying the requirements of the industry such as chemicals or equipment. He certainly believes in the importance of listening to good growers: this, he considers, can lead to solutions previously not even imagined. He has tried to address fundamental pomological questions with the goal of increasing production and management efficiency. This has required cooperation with many other workers, both students and established scientists within his own departments at Bologna and Udine, elsewhere in Italy, and internationally. He has been able to create strong and very active research groups, by motivating colleagues and young scientists to share work, experience, and knowledge. To this day, he has retained a lively, enquiring mind; he has never stopped being curious. He stimulated his coworkers to look “outside the window” by participating in international meetings, and by joining international and national research projects. He encouraged his students to work in other laboratories or in other countries. He himself spent several extended periods of leave at the Pomology Department, University of California, Davis, USA.

Professor Costa began his research career with investigations on agronomic, genetic, and chemical methods to control vegetative growth in apples, peaches, and pears. He was particularly interested in the use of plant growth regulators as growth retardants, thinning agents, and promoters of fruit set and shape, or to control fireblight in apples and pears. It is this use of plant growth regulators in fruit crop management that is probably the area of research for which he is best known in Italy as well as overseas. He was different to many of his contemporaries in that he would approach a problem directly but also would think laterally, trying to understand the processes underlying the tree’s responses to the treatments that were being applied. He has long been involved with the European Fruit Research Institutes Network (EUFRIN) Working Group on Fruit Thinning and has led the group since 1994. In that role, he has placed great emphasis on the importance of good links with chemical companies involved in the production of chemical thinning compounds. He was also interested in the efficacy of growth regulators and growth substances acting as ethylene inhibitors and, therefore, affecting the maturation and ripening of fruit while still on the plant. This work with growth regulators led to a study of the involvement of phenolics in resistance to diseases such as fireblight.

Another major interest has been in the nondestructive assessment and prediction of fruit quality, particularly by use of near‐infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) and E‐nose. NIRS has been used for the determination of internal quality parameters of major fruit species such as apples, peaches, pears, and kiwifruit, as well as for the determination of innovative harvesting indices for grouping homogeneous classes of fruits on the basis of their stage of ripening. The result of the research in this field was the development of devices, such as the DA‐meter, patented by the University of Bologna and now widely used in the industry. The quantities of antioxidants in different fruit species and cultivars have also been measured.

I first met Professor Costa in 1987 at the 1st International Symposium on Kiwifruit in Padova. He initially became involved in kiwifruit science and management soon after kiwifruit cultivation started in Italy, and he is now widely considered as one of the fathers of the development of kiwifruit as a commercial crop in that country. He was active in promoting its diffusion via dozens of talks to growers and by attending kiwifruit seminars, symposia, and technical workshops throughout the whole country, always with technical contributions on the significance for growers of innovative research. In collaboration with others, he studied such aspects as vegetative propagation, planting and training systems, bud dormancy, fertilization, irrigation, pollination, nondestructive methods of maturity forecasting, postharvest physiology and storage, and breeding, as shown by the recent selection of a yellow‐fleshed, early‐maturing, kiwifruit cultivar, ‘AC1536’, marketed as Dorì™. Over the past few years, he became active in studying the devastating new disease, bacterial canker of kiwifruit (Psa), caused by Pseudomonas syringae pv. actinidiae.

Professor Costa has been a strong proponent of cooperation worldwide in horticultural research. He has been extraordinarily active in promoting, attending, or organizing seminars and workshops, national and international meetings, and symposia, many of which have resulted in publications in Acta Horticulturae. He has edited or coedited several volumes of Acta Horticulturae and has served a term as Chair of the ISHS Pome and Stone Fruit Section. He has also undertaken the very demanding role of organizing national and international meetings. In successive years, 2009 and 2010, he accepted the daunting task of organizing two separate ISHS symposia, seeking financial support, coordinating all activities at the symposia, and editing or coediting the consequent volumes of Acta Horticulturae. Each symposium – the 11th International Symposium on Plant Bioregulators in Fruit Production, held in Bologna in 2009, and the 7th International Kiwifruit Symposium, in Faenza in 2010 – required an enormous amount of work. To organize two such ISHS symposia in successive years requires an extraordinary commitment. Recently, he was elected a Fellow of the ISHS, recognition by his peers of his dedication to horticulture and horticultural research throughout the world and of his commitment to the activities of ISHS.

I have known Mimmo for nearly 30 years. I have always enjoyed meeting him, particularly, of course, in his hometown of Bologna. I have appreciated his warm friendship and his generous hospitality, and I have always been impressed by his apparently inexhaustible energy and his seeming ability to multitask successfully. I am honored to write this dedication.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I acknowledge helpful comments from the late Norman Looney and the late Dieter Treutter, and from Errol Hewett, Huang Hongwen, Ted DeJong, Simona Nardozza, Raffaele Testolin, Giannina Vizzotto, Ian Warrington, and Tony Webster.