"The main mission of our association is to ensure that competent and satisfied professionals succeed in all fields of application of our profession, from construction sites to Public Administration. The goal is to make archaeology a better and safer place. That is why, in 2004, this association was born, from the will of a group of university students who understood that only together was it possible to make our category grow". This was how Angela Abbadessa, President of the Italian Confederation of Archaeologists, opened the conference "20 Years of CIA, 20 Years for Archaeology - From the Code to the Worksite: normative basis, prospects for development and professional growth", to celebrate the Confederation's 20th anniversary. The day was an opportunity to take stock of the state of the art of the archaeology profession in Italy, which has been recognized as such only since 2014 through a law whose implementing decrees date back only to 2019. "The first ten years of the Confederation's life were dedicated to this very thing, to have ours recognized as a regulated, protected and safeguarded profession," the President pointed out. "We succeeded in 2014 with the enactment of Law 110, but we continued to work toward this goal until 2019, when the implementing decrees of that law were finally issued, in the drafting of which we participated. But the work is not over: with the committee created by DM 244, we are still working to make the norm more applicable". Therefore, there are still many challenges and many debates facing the archaeology profession, for which CIA is the spokesperson: "We are also working to give greater authority to our profession in all fields, for example in the implementation of public works, in which archaeology is called upon to speak out in favor of the protection of archaeological heritage, a protection guaranteed by our Constitution and which is therefore fundamental for the development of Italy, in the same way that public works are also fundamental," said Angela Clara Infarinato, Vice President of CIA. Working mostly on construction sites, the vice president continued, "we are subject to the risks that a construction site has in itself; therefore, we are also working to ensure workplace safety for archaeologists, and our professional and personal protection. To this end, we have also started a kind of collaboration with INAIL for the recognition of risks on the construction site, fulfillments, but also professional difficulties related to occupational diseases", she concluded.