We are now about one months from the conference, and there are several matters, both scientific and organizational, on which I would like to draw your attention.

(1) First of all, I trust you have reserved your hotel rooms (confirmation can take some time, as the central TIVIGEST office is taking care of many hotels at the same time); if you have not, consider that this is still possible as long as they have indeed rooms (not the whole village is open in May), but we suggest you do it anyway as soon as possible. Late reservations will have to be done directly with the Hotel staff (we will say when it is late enough for this; as of now the hotel is still closed) Remember that we are not involved in the reservation process, except for those of you in special situations (who are by now aware we are taking care of it). Should you have any difficulty, you may be happy to know that in occasion of SPT2001 the hotel staff was very helpful to solve all problems.

(2) As you may already know, or can find out by looking at the map and bus schedules on our web site, reaching Cala Gonone from your entry point in Sardinia by public transportation is in general feasible - unless you arrive late at night; the bus schedules and routes are on the web site, but please check for them just before leaving, in case there is some update. On the other hand, several of you would probably prefer to have a taxi or minibus from the airport (if you arrive in Olbia) or from Nuoro (if you arrive in Alghero or Cagliari airports); in this case please remember to let us know the detail of your arrival BY THE END OF APRIL. We will post a form on the web site sometimes in next week. If you come by ferry, we can organize a taxi-minibus as well, but this is quite useless as there is a public bus starting from the port in correspondence with the ferry; you have to take this to DORGALI and there you find a connecting bus to Cala Gonone. Should you plan to rent a car for the whole conference period, it is probably a good idea to reserve it together with your flight and pick it up in the airport; rental is also possible in Cala Gonone with a local company, and this is probably better if you just want to rent for a day or two. Finally a word for participants from UK: Ryan Air is taking you to Alghero for a very cheap rate, so you could use this link; from Alghero you take a shuttle bus to Sassari and then a fast bust to Nuoro (see our page); from Nuoro you can aither use the reasonably frequent public bus to Dorgali and Cala Gonone, or take a taxi.

(3) As you see by looking at the list of preregistered participants, we have quite a long list of participants and hence of proposed talks (actually they risk to be more than we could accomodate in one week, depending on how many of the uncertain ones will ask to speak). It would be quite helpful if those of you who did not communicate a proposed TITLE could do it PLEASE quite soon (if possible with an abstract, or else just a title). In connection to this, note also that we plan to distribute abstracts to participants; in order to do so we need to receive your abstract not later than 5 MAY.

(4) This should be the last letter circulated to the whole mailing list; next messages should be circulated only to preregistered participants, but they should still be posted on the web if of general interest.

Looking forward to seeing you in Cala Gonone

Giuseppe Gaeta (also on behalf of Simonetta Abenda and Sebastian Walcher)

12 April 2002