This book is dedicated to the use of carbon monoxide as a C‐1 building block in organic synthesis. The incorporation of carbon monoxide into an organic substrate to give a carbonyl compound is called “carbonylation.” Carbonylation reactions, discovered in 1930s thanks to the pioneering work by Roelen and Reppe, are now established as a most powerful methodology for the direct synthesis of carbonyl derivatives using the simplest and readily available C‐1 unit. Impressive progress has been made in this field at both industrial and academic levels, so nowadays carbonylations are widely applied not only for the production of industrially relevant, relatively simple carbonyl compounds but also for the preparation of complex molecular architectures and even as key steps in natural product synthesis.

I have been involved in this fascinating area of research for many years, with particular interest in palladium‐catalyzed processes. After my degree in chemistry at the University of Calabria with a thesis on Pd(II)‐catalyzed alkyne carbonylation (1990), in 1991, I joined the group of Professors Gian Paolo Chiusoli and Mirco Costa at the University of Parma for a research stage. At that time, the use of CO as C‐1 unit in synthesis was among the primary research interests of Professors Chiusoli and Costa, and I was very happy to be involved in this emerging research area. Since then, I continued to work in this field during my PhD (at the University of Calabria, with Professor Giuseppe Salerno) and then in the course my independent career.

Therefore, at the end 2019, when Dr. Anne Brennführer invited me to submit a book proposal on carbonylation chemistry for Wiley‐VCH, I was very happy to accept. I was aware that other important and excellent books had been published before (the most recent one in 2014). However, I was convinced that a new updated book in this field, organized in a different way with respect to those already published, could be useful to the scientific community. In fact, a new book could be of interest not only for those researchers directly involved in carbonylation chemistry (from both academia and industry) but also for researchers, postdocs, and PhD students interested in the most recent trends in organic synthesis.

Most carbonylation processes are catalyzed by transition metal species. Different from the previous books on carbonylations, which were organized on the basis of the process type or the nature of the carbonylated product obtained, this book has been structured according to the metal promoting the carbonylation process. The aim of this kind of classification was to help the reader to better focus on the catalytic abilities and specificities of different metal catalysts in promoting various kinds of carbonylations. However, considering the increasing importance of metal‐free carbonylation reactions (radical carbonylations, in particular), a final chapter has been also devoted to this emerging area of research.

The book contributors are leading scientists in the field, who have kindly accepted my invitation to spend some of their time for the realization of this exciting project, and I extend my warmest thanks to them. I also would like to thank very much the Wiley‐VCH editors, in particular Dr. Anne Brennführer and Ms. Katherine Wong, for the kind invitation to edit this book and for their invaluable cooperation and support throughout the entire preparation of the book.

I hope you will enjoy reading the book at least as much as I have enjoyed in editing it!