  The present paper is comprised of two parts. First, we give a brief survey of
the theoretical framework for microscopic nuclear structure calculations
starting from a free nucleon-nucleon potential. Then, we present some selected
results of a comprehensive study of nuclei near doubly closed shells. In all
these shell-model calculations we have made use of realistic effective
interactions derived from the Bonn-A nucleon-nucleon potential by means of a
G-matrix folded-diagram method. We show that this kind of calculation yields a
very good agreement with experiment for all the nuclei considered. This leads
to the conclusion that realistic effective interactions are now able to
describe with quantitative accuracy the properties of complex nuclei.
