The Italian Psychedelic Movement: Buried History, Emerging Research, and the Politics of Care
There is something paradoxical, and typically Italian about the way our country relates to therapeutic psychedelics. On the one hand, a pioneering history that no one tells: psychiatric clinics scattered from Lecce to Turin (from south to north) where, between the 1930s and the late 1960s, experiments were conducted with mescaline, LSD, LSA, and psilocybin on hundreds of patients, in work that set early international precedents and then remained buried in the archives. On the other, a present day reality that struggles to acknowledge what international science has been affirming for years now with growing clarity: that certain molecules, used with care, intention, and within a solid therapeutic context, can achieve what conventional drugs often fail to do.
Yet something is shifting. Slowly, but profoundly: as is characteristic of this country.
A Forgotten First
The history of Italian psychedelia is in large part a history of collective amnesia. Giorgio Samorini, the most tenacious archaeologist of this lost memory, has unearthed an impressive body of documentation: at least 60 clinical studies conducted between 1930 and 1967, encompassing over 2,800 treatment sessions administered to roughly 900 patients across institutions distributed throughout the country. It was in Italy (in Lecce, in 1949), that Umberto De Giacomo, director of the Salento Interprovincial Psychiatric Hospital, administered the first 500 microgram dose of LSD ever given to a human being; a threshold no one had yet dared to test, and one that would only be exceeded years later by U.S. Army trials that reached doses of up to 5,250 micrograms. According to Samorini, Italy was also, in those same decades, among the pioneering countries in clinical research with psilocybin, achieving some of the most promising results in the treatment of depressive states.
Almost none of this work ever reached international journals, and to this day it remains largely unknown outside Italy. Yet those same years, in Rome, produced an episode where the history of psychiatry crosses paths with the history of cinema. In the summer of 1964, when LSD was still legal, psychoanalyst Emilio Servadio, one of the founders of Italian psychoanalysis, guided a single LSD session for his analytic patient Federico Fellini, under medical supervision. According to Servadio himself, the experience had a direct effect on the director’s subsequent work: it gave rise to Giulietta degli Spiriti (Juliet of the Spirits), which Servadio described as a kind of reckoning with the spiritualist preoccupations that had accompanied Fellini until then. Fellini himself spoke about it publicly as early in a mid 1960s BBC interview, so it was never, strictly speaking, a secret, but for decades the episode remained a niche anecdote, known mainly to film buffs and historians of Italian psychoanalysis, only resurfacing with new visibility in recent years, amid the renewed international interest in psychedelics.
All of this took place in something close to silence. Today, it remains largely forgotten within Italy itself.
What makes this story even more complex is the context in which it unfolded. Italy in the 1950s and 1960s was also the country of Franco Basaglia, the Venetian psychiatrist who, in Gorizia, launched one of the most radical deinstitutionalization processes of the 20th century, dismantling the architecture of the asylum piece by piece and posing questions that still await answers, among them what do we call normality? Where does care end and control begin? Basaglia’s democratic psychiatry and the psychedelic experiments of those same years shared, despite their differences, the fundamental insight that mental distress cannot be reduced to a chemical equation, and that the relationship between patient and therapist, between the individual and their social context, cannot be reduced to a protocol.
Law 180 of 1978, a historic victory for the Italian antipsychiatry movement, closed the mental hospitals. However, it left a void that the national healthcare system has never truly filled, and into which we still find ourselves looking today, with the new epidemic weight of the mental health crisis.
There is, however, another Italy that has not stood still during this same period, that of harm reduction. Born in response to the heroin crisis of the 1980s, the Italian harm reduction network has, over time, built one of the most serious and widespread associative networks in Europe from Forum Droghe to Gruppo Abele to Lab57, from the Serds to street cooperatives consistently championing a principle that institutional psychiatry has often struggled to adopt: that those who use substances are people to be supported, not punished or forcibly medicalized. In this sense, the culture of harm reduction has represented in Italy the strongest bridge between the counterculture of the 1970s and 1980s – with its critique of the prohibitionist paradigm and its social violence – and the contemporary scientific and therapeutic approach. Some of the figures most active today in the Italian psychedelic movement come from that tradition, or know it well: the awareness that the social and relational context of use is decisive for its outcome. The principle of set and setting is an insight that harm reduction had already put into practice long before clinical trials codified it in the literature.
The Present: An Ecosystem Under Construction.
When we speak of the “Italian psychedelic renaissance” a phrase that the international community now prefers to replace with the more sober “psychedelic resurgence” we mean the return, from the 2000s onward, of rigorous scientific interest in these molecules, which in Italy began later and is proceeding more slowly than elsewhere. Over the past two or three years, the movement has reached a critical mass that is hard to ignore.
The first institutional sign was the conference at the University of Trento, organized by the Addiction Science Lab of the Department of Psychology and Cognitive Sciences, in collaboration with MAPS Italia, on November 8 and 9, 2024. It was the first academic event of its kind in Italy, and the program for the first day, held in English and streamed internationally, was ambitious: taking the stage at the 18th century Zandonai Theater in Rovereto were, among others, Rick Doblin, David Erritzoe of The Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London, Matthias Liechti from Department of Biomedicine of the University of Basel, Tadeusz Hawrot from PAREA, and Marion Haberkamp from the European Medicines Agency. The second day, held in Italian at the MART in Rovereto, featured thematic workshops on clinical practice, research, and legal pathways, including a roundtable organized by the Luca Coscioni Association on regulatory frameworks for access to therapies. The event was entirely in person. It was the first time an Italian university had brought together the best of international psychedelic research on Italian soil, and it represented a symbolic break with the academic taboo that had previously surrounded the topic. The event, first of its kind in Italy, opened a conversation that has continued uninterrupted ever since.
A few weeks later, in December 2024, SIMEPSI (Italian Society of Psychedelic Medicine) organized a conference in Bologna in collaboration with the Swiss organizations ALPS (Awareness Lectures on Psychedelic Science) and ASPT (Association Suisse Psychédéliques en Thérapie).
In March 2026, Chieti hosted a two day international conference titled “Psychedelics: scientific research, clinical reality, therapeutic applications and regulatory implications,” organized by the Department of Neurosciences of the University of Chieti-Pescara and the Luca Coscioni Association. Among the speakers: researchers from La Sapienza and Tor Vergata in Rome, from the universities of Toronto, London and Berlin, and Rick Doblin.
On the scientific institutional front, the landscape has rapidly expanded. SIMEPSI, chaired by psychiatrist Mauro D’Alonzo, is the first Italian scientific society dedicated to research, training, and the application of psychedelic medicine. It organizes international webinars, publishes educational articles, conferences (as the one in Bologna in 2024) and maintains links with the European PAREA network. In 2025, it participated in the launch of Psychedelicare at the European Parliament.
Within institutional psychiatry, a similar space has opened up with the SIP-SSoP (Study Section on Psychedelics), a scientific body affiliated with the Italian Society of Psychiatry, the oldest and most representative organization in the field. Its existence signals that the topic is no longer the exclusive domain of parallel networks or independent associations, but has found acceptance within official academic psychiatry. A small but symbolically significant step.
MAPS Italia, founded in 2023 on the sidelines of the Psychedelic Science conference in Denver, where the Italian delegation traveled to officially establish the affiliate, is the Italian affiliate of the world’s longest standing psychedelic research organization, founded in 1985 by Rick Doblin. It is part of the coalition coordinating the Psychedelicare campaign in Italy and works to bring the need to reform the approach to mental health to the institutional level. Il Bosco Fiorito – Psichedelia: orizzonti di cura (The Flourishing Forest – Psychedelia: Horizons of Care, is the publication commissioned by MAPS Italia, curated by the author of this article for the Animamundi publishing house, which brought together many of the key figures from various associations in a work that effectively marks Italy’s rediscovery of psychedelic therapies: the book was presented in the press room of the Italian Parliament in December 2025, an institutional milestone for MAPS Italia and the entire associative landscape.
The podcast Illuminismo Psichedelico by Federico Di Vita has become, over the course of more than two hundred episodes, the main forum for public cultural, therapeutic, and political / legal debate on psychedelics in Italy. Di Vita was also the curator of La Scommessa Psichedelica (The Psychedelic Gamble) edited by Quodlibet: a collective book reflecting, back in 2020, on “what psychedelics do and what they might still do”.
The Luca Coscioni Association, which produces Di Vita’s podcast, has always been active in the areas of civil rights, especially health and end of life rights. With a long history of activism in favor of drug legalization, it has recently taken up the cause of psychedelics therapies with a wide range of initiatives.
The Studio Aegle newsletter, edited by Dott. Caterina Bartoli since 2024, provides constant updates on international studies with scientific rigor and accessible, popular science writing. In 2025, UNEPSI was also founded, the first national network of university student associations dedicated to scientific outreach on the topic – a significant generational milestone.
Training Caregivers
In a growing ecosystem, the training of professionals is the most urgent frontier. It is a matter of acquiring the relational, ethical, and clinical skills necessary to accompany someone through an experience of expanded consciousness, and then help them integrate it into their lives. Illuminismo Psichedelico has also paved this path in the realm of training, with courses and in depth programs dedicated to mental health professionals.
In the fall of 2026, MAPS Italia is bringing to Italy for the first time the residential MDMA-Assisted Therapy training developed by MAPS USA based on forty years of clinical research. It will take place from September 20 to 26, 2026, at the Workation Village in San Sebastiano da Po. The program, conducted in English by MAPS lead educators, is open to mental health professionals from across Europe. Around 20 scholarships are available: those for Italian participants will prioritize researchers interested in initiating MDMA research in Italy and therapists working with survivors of sexual violence, domestic violence, and migrants. Additional scholarships for Palestinian and Lebanese researchers and therapists will be funded by philanthropists.
The Chieti Case: Genuine Research, Problematic Communication
On July 9, 2025, the first Italian clinical trial with psilocybin began in Chieti (at the same university that would organize the aforementioned conference the following year): a study coordinated by the Istituto Superiore di Sanità (ISS) under the supervision of principal investigator Francesca Zoratto, and conducted at the Psychiatric Clinic of the Chieti hospital under the direction of Prof. Giovanni Martinotti of the University Gabriele d’Annunzio, involving 68 patients with treatment-resistant depression. It is funded through Italy’s Piano Nazionale di Ripresa e Resilienza (PNRR), the national post-pandemic recovery plan. The study is significant news. But just a few months after it began, it also became the center of a controversy that has swept through the Italian and international psychedelic community.
Early this May, the show Le Iene, broadcast on Italia 1 – a network founded in the 1980s by Berlusconi – aired a 20’ segment in which their correspondent followed the trial closely, including footage of patients under the influence of psilocybin, filmed with the entire crew present in the room and later widely shared on social media. Studio Aegle wrote about it in a commentary later republished by Il Foglio Psichiatrico, a mental health newsletter known since 2017 for grounding its coverage in peer reviewed literature rather than easy answers. The piece, titled “Psilocybin in Prime Time,” argued that the Chieti team’s protocol was built around a specific hypothesis: isolating the molecule stripping away psychotherapy, music, and the traditional therapeutic setting, in order to study the compound on its own terms. That premise, Studio Aegle wrote, made the presence of a television crew in the room not just an ethical problem, but “a methodologically catastrophic choice.” Psychiatrist Fabio Villa, who practices psilocybin and MDMA assisted therapy in Geneva, used a blunter word: “grossolano,” crude, and asked the question the broadcast never addressed: does filming a patient under psilocybin with a full TV crew not alter the very setting the therapy depends on?
The episode raised issues that go beyond the specific case: the difficulty of communicating psychedelic research responsibly to a broad audience; the risk of uncontrolled emulation in the absence of clear communication regarding the legal status of the substances (psilocybin is still classified as a Schedule I substance in Italy; its use outside a clinical context is a criminal offense); and, more profoundly, the debate over the very concept of psychedelic therapy, whether its efficacy lies in the molecule itself or in the interplay between the molecule, preparation, setting, and integration.
It is worth emphasizing that the international scientific consensus on this point is becoming increasingly clear: the best results are achieved when administration is embedded within a structured therapeutic pathway, involving preparation and integration. As Piero Cipriano wrote in his Ayahuasca e cura del mondo, the “dream of the psychedelic hospital” is not realized by reducing these substances to “smart missiles” to be added to the formulary, but by radically rethinking the model of care.
Psychedelicare: Italy Signs On
On February 6, 2025, in the Altiero Spinelli Room of the European Parliament, Psychedelicare was officially launched the first European Citizens’ Initiative on psychedelic assisted psychotherapy, promoted by over 30 organizations in 17 countries, including, for Italy, the Luca Coscioni Association, SIMEPSI, MAPS Italia, and Forum Droghe. It was the first time the psychedelic issue had entered a European institution at that level with full legitimacy. The ECI called on the Commission to support shared standards for therapies, promote research, and review the UN conventions that hinder their development. Within twelve months, one million signatures had to be collected in at least seven member states. The goal was not met by the January 2026 deadline (as is the case with the vast majority of ECIs, a necessarily difficult instrument), but the network built around the campaign has not dissolved: Psychedelicare continues as a European advocacy platform, bringing together a transnational coalition that did not exist before. And Italy, with one of the most active signature drives in Europe during the first few weeks, has shown it has something to say.
Where to? The National Health Service as an opportunity and a stake in the game
The comparison with the United States is illuminating, but must be made with caution. In the U.S., the path taken from Colorado to Oregon Measure 109 has been one of decriminalization and the creation of regulated markets. A path that has produced results alongside distortions, from the commodification of psychedelic therapy to access limited to those who can afford sessions costing thousands of dollars, and the risk, as Rick Doblin warned in his interview in Il Bosco Fiorito, that these treatments become, in his words, “elitist, exclusionary, and privatized.”
Italy, and Europe more broadly, holds a card that the United States does not: a public healthcare system, however strained it may be. If psychedelic therapies were to enter the national healthcare system through public regulation instead of through the private market, the issue of accessibility could be addressed structurally, rather than as a residual problem to be solved with scholarships or charitable programs.
The stakes are enormous. It is a matter of deciding whether these therapies which science describes as effective especially when integrated into a pathway of preparation, session, and integration, namely the PAT (Psychedelic Assisted Therapy) protocol developed by MAPS will enter the National Health Service as a treatment for those suffering from treatment resistant depression, PTSD, addictions, or end of life existential anxiety, or whether they will remain the preserve of those who can pay.
There is also a deeper epistemological issue, one that directly challenges the dominant model of mental health. In his critique of the “chemical asylum,” Piero Cipriano observed how contemporary psychiatry tends to treat mental distress as a problem of biochemical imbalance, and to respond with drugs that “mask” symptoms without transforming anything. Psychedelic molecules work in a radically different way: they do not act on the brain like classic psychotropic drugs, which depress or stimulate specific neurotransmitter systems, but rather open temporarily, with real risks that require a controlled setting windows of neuroplasticity and expanded consciousness, allowing the patient to rework memories, dissolve cognitive automatisms, and alter their relationship with themselves.
Tommaso Barba is an italian researcher at The Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College, who’s very active in advocacy on general media and social media. In a collective article published in the Alias supplement of the daily newspaper Il Manifesto, A Mushroom in the Mind, he explains that under the influence of these substances, the Default Mode Network, the hierarchical control network in the brain that organizes automatic thought processes and, in depressed individuals, fuels rumination is temporarily deactivated, allowing the mind to explore new connections. Recalling what Aldous Huxley called the “reducing valve”, this deactivation is not a matter of stunning the patient, but of freeing them, temporarily, and in a controlled setting, from the prison of their own patterns.
The sociopolitical consequences of this difference, if incorporated into a public health system, are not negligible. A state that funds psychedelic treatment is funding a process of consciousness transformation, with all that this implies in terms of autonomy, critical thinking, and redefinition of values. Governments tend to look the other way, but societies cannot afford to anymore.
Conclusion: The Courage to Start Over From Here
The Italian psychedelic movement is young, diverse, and often fragmented. It still lacks a unified legislative strategy, a stable institutional partner, and resources. But it has something of value: a network of competent, motivated people who, unlike in many other contexts, are aware of the pitfalls, both scientific and political, of the path they are embarking upon. What is missing, perhaps, is the memory of how far down this road we have already traveled. Between 1930 and 1967, in mental hospitals that were still called by that name, someone had already begun. That history is buried under decades of prohibition and oblivion. Bringing it back to the surface is an act of historiographical justice and the foundation upon which to build an Italian narrative of psychedelia that goes beyond both an uncritical importation of the American model and a provincial resistance to change.
Italy had forgotten what it knew. Now it can remember and decide whether what it builds will benefit patients in the public system or only those who can afford it.
Editor’s note: This article discusses MAPS Italia and Il Bosco Fiorito; the author is affiliated with both.
