"Nucleosynthesis and Chemical Evolution of Galaxies" (Cambridge University Press, 1997), and the subject of galactic chem­ ical evolution has appeared only as short chapters in books devoted to other subjects. Therefore, I felt that a book of this kind could be useful. The book summarizes the observational facts which allow us to reconstruct the chemical history of our Galaxy, in particular the abundances in stars and in­ terstellar medium; in the last decade, a great deal of observational work, mostly abundance determinations in stars in the solar vicinity, has shed light on the pro­ duction and distribution of chemical elements. Even more recently more abun­ dance data have accumulated for external galaxies at both low and high redshift, thus providing precious information on the chemical evolution of different types of galaxies and on the early stages of galaxy evolution.