Guided by the Golden Eagle

The Story of MAPS Italia
By: Michèle Anne Barocchi, PhD

It all began in Oaxaca, Mexico, in March 2021. I had traveled there to work with the medicine of the Sonoran Desert toad — Incilius alvarius — a powerful amphibian whose secretion contains 5-MeO-DMT and other alkaloids, used ceremonially by certain local healers. During my stay at a local bed-and-breakfast, I struck up a conversation with a newly found friend named Aya. She asked if I knew about MAPS. At the time, I had never even heard of it. That’s when I discovered the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies and, through Aya, was introduced to Federico Menapace, former Deputy Director of MAPS and one of her longtime friends. That connection would change the course of my life.

Our meeting was serendipitous, the kind of connection that feels predestined when you look back on it. We were all on that first video call, and between the three of us — in the humid, electric air of Oaxaca — the seed of an idea was planted. By the end of that month, once back in Italy, Federico connected me with an Italian psychotherapist who had just published an article in Rolling Stone Italia about ayahuasca. These were not random encounters, but meaningful ones that created, at the time, an unspoken agreement: to bring the psychedelic conversation, in all its depth and complexity, to Italy. A month later, I was on my way to Turin to attend a seminar with a small group of psychotherapists who were beginning to openly discuss psychedelic-assisted therapies. These were not mainstream conversations in Italy — far from it. At the time, public discussion of psychedelics was minimal, often stigmatized, and highly fragmented. But those first exchanges in Turin in May of 2021, were the beginning of something much bigger.

In truth, Italy has a longer, more complex history with psychedelic research. Between the 1930s and 1960s, Italian psychiatrists conducted over sixty clinical studies with psilocybin and LSD, often focused on depression and neuroses — a record highlighted in Adriana D’Arienzo and Giorgio Samorini’s historical overview published in Drug Science in 2023. Yet after this intense period, research was halted and largely forgotten. Over the past decade, a slow-moving dialogue has re-emerged among a few therapists and psychiatrists interested in altered states of consciousness and therapies assisted with psychoactive substances and integration of these experiences. Our own first pre–MAPS Italia symposium reflected this revival: the November 2021 presentation in Florence of Giorgio Samorini’s book Ayahuasca: from the Amazon to Italy, which brought together many of the contributing authors. These steps signaled that we were moving into a new era — one of more open dialogue, reconnection with our own historical roots, and a clearer vision for the future dialogue of psychedelic-assisted therapies in Italy.

Over the next few years, we slowly built a team — each person bringing a unique skill set and perspective, united by one vision: to bring awareness to what was happening globally in the field of psychedelics, and to explore both the potential benefits and the risks of psychedelic-assisted therapies for mental health. Our core group took shape: a scientist, a strategist and business consultant, a public policy expert, and a journalist-artist. Together, we imagined an Italy where people could have access to accurate, unbiased, and accessible information about psychedelic science, therapy, law, and culture. This vision was formalized on May 28, 2024, in Sarajevo, when we officially signed the agreement to become a global affiliate of MAPS during the Healing Balkans Conference, which also hosted a MAPS MDMA-Assisted Psychotherapy Training.