Status of the STAR Project.

STAR is a Thomson back-scattering source of tunable mono-chromatic X-ray beams (20--90 keV) under commissioning at Università della Calabria (UniCal), aiming at developing a unique user facility in the Mediterranean area, enabling advanced research in the fields of cultural heritage investigations, radiological imaging diagnostics and science of matter in general. Hosted in a dedicated building inside the UniCal Campus, and connected to several laboratories supporting the related research activities, STAR is based on a high brightness 100 Hz electron Linac delivering up to 65 MeV electrons to the collision point with an amplified J-class Yb:Yag laser, that is back-scattered to generate collimated high brilliance X-rays. These will serve beam-lines of micro-tomography and other X-ray imaging techniques. We discuss and illustrate the advancement of STAR commissioning, as well as the future plans of upgrade towards higher X-ray photon energies (MeV-class) and fluxes (from $10^{9}$ photons/s up to $10^{11}$ photons/s within 5% rms bandwidth). As a quite significant remark we underline how the development of STAR represented and stands on a very virtuous and fruitful example of inter-institutional collaboration among several Italian stake-holders in fundamental and applied research, like UniCal, CNISM, INFN and Elettra Sincrotrone, with good perspectives to including in the near future more actors within the collaboration, like CNR and other Italian, European and African Universities/Institutions.