This is an extended and enhanced version of an existing textbook written in Italian
(and published by Springer-Verlag). That edition and this one are based on a common
part that originated, in preliminary form, when I was a Physics undergraduate at the
University of Genova. The third-year compulsory lecture course called Institutions
of Theoretical Physics was the second exam that had us pupils seriously climbing the
walls (the first being the famous Physics II, covering thermodynamics and classical
electrodynamics).