At the ISS physics laboratory, I performed experiments in nuclear and particle physics and worked part-time in radiation physics and radiotherapy, a subject that I really enjoyed. I therefore decided to go back to radiation physics; a few years later, my wife Clelia said, “You went back to your first love”. Treatment room of the CNAO hadron therapy centre in Italy. Overall, one can say that CNAO, as a spin-off of CERN and TERA, fully justifies my motto “Physics is beautiful and useful”. Ugo was one of the speakers at the recent CERN70 public event “From particle physics to medicine”.