Landslides are widespread all over the world. Every year they cause loss of goods, properties and of human lives. Fast slope movements represent the most catastrophic type of landslides, which can produce strong destruction and deaths, this often occurs in extremely poor regions of the world. Because of either climatic changes or the explosive development of areas occupied by urban settlements, in the last century the risk of catastrophic landslides has strongly increased. In particular, prolonged and extremely intense rainfalls, which more and more occur in areas characterised by a temperate climate, are the main cause of catastrophic fast slope movements mostly involving rock masses and granular soils. In addition, earthquakes strongly contribute to the amount of damage caused by slope failures. As a consequence, the loss of goods and human lives has become awful. This is frankly unbearable of modern countries which should devote all their efforts in the increase of safety and wealth of population. This, and recent tremendous experiences which shocked our Country, are the main reasons that made us setting up an international conference whose main goal is the improvement of the criteria of risk assessment and mitigation. To get such a goal, we asked well known experts from all parts of the world to give their contribution to attain the scopes of the conference. The first volume of the Proceedings, this volume, contains 81 papers written by 118 Authors from 21 Countries. Many types of landslides are considered, both in rocks and soils, either granular or fine grained. A number of papers describe the mechanisms of landslides and report an interpretation of the mechanics of failure and movement, several papers examine the factors which govern soil behaviour and the procedures to be adopted for predicting movements, others illustrate criteria for assessing the hazard and the risk, finally, some of them discuss criteria for risk mitigation. As usual, the quality of the contributions is variable: some are excellent from all points of view, others represent an useful contribution for understanding special situations that are out of our experience. The knowledge is a mix of theory, insight and experience, not necessarily our own experience, which can be acquired through information and discussions. This is one of the major contributions of conferences, such a conference certainly contributed to the growth of our knowledge.