  The Chiral Quark-Soliton Model of nucleons is based on two ideas: 1) the
major role of spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking in hadron physics and 2) the
relevance of the large number of colours limit for the real world. In these
lectures I review the theoretical foundations of the model, the physics
involved, and some of applications.
  Contents:
  1. How do we know chiral symmetry is spontaneously broken?
  2. Low-energy limit of QCD from instantons
  2.1. Some of the results
  2.2. Instanton-induced interactions
  2.3. Bosonization
  2.4. Chiral lagrangian
  3. Properties of the chiral lagrangian
  3.1. Derivative expansion and interpolation formula
  3.2. The Wess-Zumino term and the baryon number
  4. The nucleon
  4.1. Physical motivations
  4.2. Nucleon mass: a functional of the pion field
  4.3. Nucleon profile
  4.4. Quantum numbers of baryons
  4.5. Some applications
  4.6. Nucleon structure functions
  5. Conclusions
