  This document contains a review on the quark model, prepared for lectures at
the Niccolo Cabeo School at Ferrara in May 2012. It includes some historical
aspects, the spectral properties of the 2-body and 3-body Schroedinger
operators applied to mesons and baryons, the link between meson and baryon
spectra, the role of flavour independence, and the speculations about stable or
metastable multiquarks. The analogies between few-charge systems and few-quark
bound states will be underlined.
