diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
new file mode 100644
index 00000000..f341f7d7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/README.md
@@ -0,0 +1,33 @@
+The **_Visualization and Computer Graphics Library_** (VCGlib for short) is a open source, portable, C++, templated, no dependency, library for manipulation, processing and displaying with OpenGL of triangle and tetrahedral meshes.
+
+The library, composed by more than 100k lines of code, is released under the GPL license, and it is the base of most of the software tools of the [Visual Computing Lab](http://vcg.isti.cnr.it) of the Italian National Research Council Institute ISTI , like MeshLab, metro and many others.
+
+The VCG library is tailored to mostly manage triangular meshes: The library is fairly large and offers many state of the art functionalities for processing meshes, like:
+
+- high quality quadric-error edge-collapse based simplfication,
+- efficient spatial query structures (uniform grids, hashed grids, kdtree, ...) ,
+- advanced smoothing and fairing algorithms,
+- computation of curvature,
+- optimization of texture coordinates,
+- Hausdorff distance computation,
+- Geodesic paths,
+- mesh repairing capabilities,
+- isosurface extraction and advancing front meshing algorithms,
+- Poisson Disk sampling and other tools to sample point distributions over meshes,
+- subdivision surfaces
+
+## Notable Applications
+
+A number of applications have been developed using the vcglib:
+
+- MeshLab: the renowed open source mesh processing is based on this library.
+- Metro, the tool for measuring differences between meshes
+- The first high quality out-of-core mesh simplifier that was used by the Stanford Digital Michelangelo project to process their huge 3D scanned models.
+
+## Contacts
+
+For any info about licensing (portion of) the library please contact us:
+Paolo Cignoni (p.cignoni@isti.cnr.it) 
+Visual Computing Lab of the Italian National Research Council - ISTI
+
+In case of bugs please report them [here](https://github.com/cnr-isti-vclab/vcglib/issues) .