road, suggested by Theodor Kaluza exactly a century ago in 1919, was to consider higher dimensions in an attempt to unify the field theories of gravitation and electromagnetism. In the same year, another road was proposed by Hermann Weyl. In this case, the idea was to derive alternative field equations of a metric theory of gravity by starting with a different action. Instead of using the Einstein–Hilbert Lagrangian of General Relativity, which is simply the Ricci curvature scalar $R$ (a double contraction of a single Riemann tensor), Weyl proposed a Lagrangian containing *contractions of a product of two curvature tensors*. Such a Lagrangian is thus not linear in curvature — it is quadratic so that this theory can be naturally called “quadratic gravity”. Einstein was well aware of these attempts to formulate such alternative theories of gravity, and for some time he also worked on them. Interestingly, expressions for the quadratic gravity theory can be found even in his last writing pad (at the bottom of its last but one page) which he used in spring 1955.

Although it turned out rather quickly that these original classical theories extending General Relativity led to specific conceptual, mathematical and physical problems, the 