An introduction to the quark model

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.