The flaring blazars of the first 1.5 years of the AGILE mission

We report the AGILE γ -ray observations and the results of the multiwavelength campaigns on seven flaring blazars detected by the mission: During two multiwavelength campaigns, we observed γ -ray activity from two Flat Spectrum Radio Quasars of the Virgo region, e.g. 3C 279 and 3C 273 (the latter being the first extragalactic source simultaneously observed with the γ -ray telescope and the hard X ray imager of the mission). Due to the large FOV of the AGILE/GRID instrument, we achieved an almost continuous coverage of the FSRQ 3C 454.3. The source showed flux above 10−6 photons/cm2/s ( E > 100 MeV ) and showed day by day variability during all the AGILE observing periods. In the EGRET era, the source was found in high γ -ray activity only once. An other blazar, PKS 1510-089 was frequently found in high γ -ray activity. S5 0716+71, an intermediate BL Lac object, exhibited a very high γ -ray activity and fast γ -ray variability during a period of intense optical activity. We observed high γ -ray activity from W Comae, a BL Lac object, and Mrk 421, a high energy peaked BL Lac object. For this source, a multiwavelength campaign from optical to TeV has been performed.