If I speak to you of Rome, it is not only for its stones, its ruins or its squares. It is because here, in this city, another kind of empire was built — not an empire of lands, but an empire of relationships: that of family therapy in Europe. And at the centre of that story stands a man whose trajectory reads like a saga: Maurizio Andolfi.

Born in 1942, a child neuropsychiatrist, professor, founder of institutions, creator of networks, Andolfi is not merely a name in a bibliography. He is a bridge-builder. An organiser. A road-builder, in the Roman sense of the term: someone who connects worlds that, without him, might have stayed apart.

Picture a historic café near the Piazza del Popolo: the Caffè Rosati. Maurizio tells me he used to meet his friends there when he was eighteen or twenty, at the end of the 1950s and the start of the 1960s, long before family therapy became a structured field. And yet these places count. Because great trajectories are often born of ordinary conversations, in places that give you a taste for the world.

Rome in the 1970s: a cauldron

Rome then becomes an intellectual and political cauldron. In the field of mental health, people debate hierarchy, status, power, ideology. Groups form, currents seek each other out, systemic thinking circulates and begins to settle in. In an account reported by Carmine Saccu, you can already sense the forces at work: Luigi Cancrini’s group and Vella’s. Two poles, two atmospheres, two ways of thinking about clinical work and about institutions.

It is there that Andolfi makes a decisive move — one that will help change the trajectory of an entire discipline in Europe. In 1972 he decides to leave for the United States. In the account reported by Saccu, a simple, powerful sentence sums up his intention: Maurizio wants to meet all the pioneers. Not just read their concepts. Meet them. Watch them work. Question them. Understand in person.

To manage it, Andolfi does not settle for a phone call. Saccu recounts that in Rome he works hours upon hours to establish contacts. He acts as a diplomat, an explorer or a strategist would: he prepares the ground, traces routes, secures access. He is methodical, tenacious, and he succeeds. In April 1974, Saccu joins him in the United States, and Andolfi introduces him to a great many of these figures. As if, already, he were not travelling only for himself: he was travelling to bring something back to Europe.

Then comes the return. In October 1974, Andolfi comes back to Rome, and the system reacts at once. Every group wants to bring him in: Cancrini, Vella, and others besides. Each wants him inside its own constellation.

Saccu then describes a highly politicised period, marked by an ideal of equality between professions: no one was to stand higher than the others, no one was to be too different. And sometimes those who are learning claim already to know, so as not to acknowledge the gap in competence. Saccu recounts that Andolfi feels a strong loyalty to Cancrini. He stays in that group. He teaches. The others learn. But without always granting him a genuinely singular place.

At the same time, Saccu explains that he had put together a group of trainees: there were twelve of them. Andolfi would have been the thirteenth. They then perform a rare gesture: they clearly recognise him as their teacher. They give him an explicit place. Professor Bollea subsequently sets up a new family therapy service, of which Andolfi becomes director. But Andolfi struggles with a certain way of working among some colleagues: they look for pathology in the child rather than in family relationships.

Turning an idea into infrastructure

From then on, the epic accelerates. Because Andolfi does not settle for learning. He organises. He builds.

In July 1975, Rome hosts a congress that marks a threshold in the European history of family therapy: Family Therapy in the Community. The team from the Ackerman Institute in New York is present, and Harry Aponte brings to it all the power of the structural model.

Then, in November 1976, four people found the Institute: Maurizio Andolfi, Carmine Saccu, Anna Maria Niccolò and Paolo Menghi. In 1977, Andolfi founds the journal Terapia Familiare. Now a journal is not merely a place of publication. It is a kind of intellectual aqueduct: ideas circulate through it, are archived, debated, transmitted. It gives a discipline a common language and a continuity.

But the real explosion, Maurizio locates very precisely: Florence, 1978. There he organises a second international conference, bearing the same title as the Rome one. One thousand two hundred participants from all over the world come together. And the concentration of pioneers is impressive: Bowen, Framo, Minuchin, Bloch, Haley, Skinner, Papp, La Perrière, Zwerling, Madanes, and many more. Around these figures, the whole of Europe is taking shape: Mony Elkaïm, the Milan school, the British, the Romans, the French… A discipline takes form before the very eyes of those living it.

In 1982, he invites Whitaker and Minuchin to Venice for a residency led by three voices. They work, they experiment, they show how to supervise. Around fifty people come from all over Europe, and even from Argentina.

Differentiation, then the Accademia

And yet, like any living structure, this Roman adventure then goes through something systemic thinkers know how to think about: differentiation. Saccu recounts that they first work together as thirteen, then as four, until 1991, when they part ways. But the matrix does not disappear. It differentiates. One branch continues its development under Andolfi’s impetus, another takes its own path around Saccu. Two schools, two styles, two ways of inhabiting a shared inheritance.

Maurizio then founds the Accademia di Psicoterapia della Famiglia, at 34 Via Antonio Bosio.

Inside there is his office, a meeting room, posters from international events, photographs with several pioneers. But the place also tells of the present.

If you want to understand how a movement becomes a tradition, this is where to look. Five minutes away on foot lies Villa Torlonia, a historic park where, he tells me, he used to play football with his sons at various periods of his life. That detail is not anecdotal. It is a reminder that great intellectual figures do not only build schools: they also inhabit places, times, bonds, an intimacy.

Connecting countries, schools and generations

Then another chapter enters the stage: that of EFTA, the European Family Therapy Association. EFTA’s historical accounts mention the coordination of a European network of family therapists led with Maurizio Andolfi, alongside Mony Elkaïm. As if one of the engines of this discipline had consisted precisely in that patient work of connecting countries, schools and generations of therapists.

For the past fourteen years, Maurizio has been living in Australia. That new geography has opened another theatre of expansion: Taipei, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, and finally China. Three of his books have been translated there. Teams are being trained in his approach. As if family therapy, born in part in the streets of Rome, were now finding other languages, other families, other cultural codes, other ways of transmitting. In Kuala Lumpur, a group he has trained over the past ten years has even opened the Andolfi Family Therapy Centre.

To understand the spirit of this trajectory, Maurizio reminds me of an image dear to him: Marco Polo, whom he has already named as his hero. Not a conqueror, but an explorer. Someone who crosses worlds, learns their codes and brings back stories that redraw the map.

Returning to the forum

So if I am here, in Rome, to tell this epic, it is not only to recite dates. It is to film places that hold a memory.

In 2023, at a conference in Assisi, he coordinates a broad network of professionals to draft a manifesto intended to serve as a foundation for future generations of therapists. In 2025, we find him again on an EFTA stage, at the EFTA-RELATES congress in Lyon: as a speaker, as a figure of transmission, speaking about multigenerational family therapy and carrying a broader message about the therapist’s responsibility in the face of the world’s crises.

The loop is a fine one, because it resembles Rome itself: to leave, to learn, to build, to transmit, to be transformed, and then to return to the forum to share what matters.

If the history of family therapy in Europe has had several capitals, Rome is unquestionably one of its major hearths. And if that history has had its architects, Maurizio Andolfi is one of the most important. Not only because he thought, wrote and taught, but because he connected. He did what Rome already knew how to do: build roads so that worlds could meet.

This Roman journey, filmed on location, can be watched below — in French.