 Cognitive decline due to ageing is becoming a major clinical and economic issue. Italy has 700,000 patients with dementia and 100,000 new cases are detected every year. Most common causes of dementia are Alzheimers Disease AD and vascular dementia VD. No treatment is available for the two conditions: drugs currently used are poorly effective and do not prevent, heal, stop, or delay the progression of the disease. It is therefore crucial to find interventions to counteract and slow cognitive decline from an early stage. A combined physical and cognitive training could convey benefits. Several studies have shown that both the strengthening of social and cognitive abilities and physical exercise do exert a positive effect on brain function in the elderly, and they reduce the risk of developing dementia by 20-50; experimental studies on animal models support these findings, and also show a reversion of cognitive decline. On the other hand, controlled intervention studies on human beings are few and show methodological limitations. It is now established that subclinical cerebral alterations, detectable with structural and functional neuroimaging, appear well before clinical disease occur; this is called Mild Cognitive Impairment MCI and dramatically raises the risk of developing dementia in comparison to individuals without MCI. In this condition, a progressive decrease of the number and quality of synaptic connections in specific areas of the brain has been hypothesized; interventions aimed at counteracting the decrease in synaptic function and density, augmenting neural plasticity and the development and sparing of mnemonical circuits, could slow the progression to overt dementia. An early detection of cognitive impairment could allow to exploit the residual plasticity of the nervous system through therapeuticrehabilitative interventions. The working hypothesis for this project is that physical and cognitive stimulation could positively affect cognitive decline in subjects at risk for dementia or with dementia at its early stage. This could delay the loss of self-sufficiency, therefore improving quality of life both for the patient and his caregivers with a safe and relatively cheap intervention, also reducing direct and indirect costs for caregiving for the families and the National Health Service. 