  After initially meeting with fierce resistance, "branes", p-dimensional
extended objects which go beyond particles (p=0) and strings (p=1), now occupy
centre stage in theoretical physics as microscopic components of M-theory, as
the seeds of the AdS/CFT correspondence, as a branch of particle phenomenology,
as the higher-dimensional progenitors of black holes and, via the
"brane-world", as entire universes in their own right. Notwithstanding this
early opposition, Nino Zichichi invited me to to talk about supermembranes and
eleven dimensions at the 1987 School on Subnuclear Physics and has continued to
keep Erice on the brane ever since. Here I provide a distillation of my Erice
brane lectures and some personal recollections.
