This paper summarize the advances during five years of synthesis and crystal-chemical studies of richterites. The produced amphiboles have been characterized by means of XRD‚ SEM, Rietveld structure refinement and several spectroscopic techniques (IR, microRaman, XANES and EXAFS). All the results obtained by means of these techniques are described and compared. The Rietveld method proved to be an extremely powerful tool for the direct characterization of site occupancies, even when dealing with polyphase run products, while spectroscopic methods proved to be useful in deriving local structural features such as cation distribution and polyhedral distorsions. The importance of combining modern XRD methods together with spectroscopic techniques in order to fully characterize synthetic, fine-grained materials is stressed.