The Italian Geotechnical Society (IGS) – Associazione Geotecnica Italiana (AGI) organized the annual Conference on the 13th of December 2017 at the “Auditorium Antonianum” in Roma.

The conference was dedicated to the memory of the late Professor Arrigo Croce, who was the first professor of Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering in Italy, President of the AGI, vice-President for Europe of the ISSMFE and co-founder of the Technical Committee devoted to the Geotechnical Aspects of Preservation of Historic Sites.

The Croce lecture 2017 was delivered by Kerry Rowe, Queen's University – Canada and Past President of IGS, with the title: “Environmental Geotechnics: Looking Back, Looking Forward”.

The conference was opened with the greetings from Nicola Moraci, President of the Italian Geotechnical Society AGI, and the Croce lecturer was introduced by Daniele Cazzuffi, President of AGI-IGS, the Italian Chapter of IGS, who highlighted the important contributions of Prof. Rowe in the area of environmental geotechnics and engineering with geosynthetics.

The outstanding lecture provided excellent state-of-art lessons learned from the past and provided future perspectives in different topics of the environmental geotechnics, for example the contaminant migration in compacted clay liners, the behavior of the leachate collection systems, the geomembranes long-term performance both in contaminated sites and also in landfill applications and the interaction between harsh climate and composite liners.

More than 200 geotechnical professionals from different sectors including universities, public institutions, enterprises and contractors came from different parts of the world to gather together for this special event.

The annual conference closed with a light buffet where all the participants could spend a nice time together and have the chance to exchange traditional greetings for the coming new year.