The University of Bologna and its Academy of Sciences, in collaboration with the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics and the Italian Physical Society, celebrated in 1998 the bicentenary of a great pioneer in the field of electric phenomena - Luigi Galvani, the father of macroelectricity. During these two centuries, the physics of electric phenomena has given rise first to the Maxwell equations, then to quantum electrodynamics, and finally to the synthesis of all reproducible phenomena, the "Standard Model." A cornerstone of the Standard Model is quantum chromodynamics (QCD), which...