On the Formation and Evolution of QSOs

I had the privilege, many years ago, to be supervised by Alfonso Cavaliere in my Master thesis work. I remember the great patience and enthusiasm with which, in a warm summer day, he presented to me a score of exciting astrophysical problems. We finally determined to study the relationship of QSOs and BL Lacs—then considered rather exotic object—with normal galaxies. In the years I have continued on this line of research, reacting far too slowly to the wealth of new ideas that Alfonso has been continuously injecting in our conversations. As examples I will report two recent results on the chemical abundances of QSO host galaxies and on the space density of high-z QSOs, which are closely related to our shared interest on AGN.