The Large Hadron Collider at CERN and its experiments are one of the most complex scientific enterprises of this century. The Higgs boson discovery is among their many scientific achievements. Remarkably, these experimental infrastructures, and the science done with it, are the end products of huge international  collaborations. In this talk, I will use the Higgs boson discovery as an excuse to tell a bit about how these experimental facilities work, and what it is like to work there.

After my PhD in Pisa, I have worked in Switzerland, Germany and finally in the UK, at the University of Sussex as Lecturer, then progressing to professorship. I have been working for many years at the ATLAS experiment, mainly working to the search of new phenomena not predicted by the current model of fundamental interactions. My list of publications includes about 1000 papers, including the paper about the discovery of the Higgs boson and many highly cited papers.