  Bruno Touschek's life as a physicist spanned the period from World War II to
the 1970s. He was a key figure in the developments of electron-positron
colliders, storage rings, and gave important contributions to theoretical high
energy physics. Storage rings, initially developed for high energy physics, are
being widely used in many countries as synchrotron radiation sources and are a
tool for research in physics, chemistry, biology environmental sciences and
cultural heritage studies. We describe Touschek's life in Austria, where he was
born, Germany, where he participated to the construction of a betatron during
WWII, and Italy, where he proposed and led to completion the first
electron-positron storage ring in 1960, in Frascati. We highlight how his
central European culture influenced his life style and work, and his main
contributions to physics, such as the discovery of the Touschek effect and beam
instabilities in the larger storage ring ADONE.
