Beside their technological applications, colloids have provided us with tunable model systems for exploring thermodynamic and kinetic phenomena of fundamental value. The hard-sphere crystallization, the glass transition, the range-controlled thermodynamic existence of the liquid state are beautiful examples of exploiting the "large atom" nature of colloids.

In the last ten years, a significant effort has been put in the direction of providing valence to colloids, to move from colloidal atoms to colloidal molecules. A large amount of experimental, theoretical and numerical efforts has been devoted to the synthesis and to the investigation of these anisotropic colloids.

In the talk I will focus on the possibility of controlling the interaction between colloidal particles (specifically exploiting the addressability of DNA sequences) to deepen our understanding of the collective behaviour of atoms and molecules as well as to design materials with unconventional behaviours.