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The Italian Psychoanalytical Society (SPI) will soon celebrate its hundredth anniversary. It was founded on 7 June 1925 in Teramo (Rome) by the psychiatrist Marco Levi Bianchini, who was then director of the city’s mental asylum. The first president of the new society was the Triestine psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Edoardo Weiss. The two doctors had an age gap of fourteen years and different characters, but they had in common the project – at that time almost visionary – of spreading psychoanalytical thought in Italy, a country that was “reluctant not only to accept it, but also to name it” (Bianchini, 1950). Freud had direct contact with both doctors and steadfastly and tenaciously supported the efforts of Levi Bianchini, who knew psychoanalysis only through the reading of texts and contacts with the psychoanalysts of the first Freudian circle, as well as of the young Weiss, who was able to draw on a more solid experience of psychoanalysis thanks to the analysis he had done in Vienna with Paul Federn and to his training within the Viennese school. The two precursors endeavoured to introduce the new science, despite the hostility of medical-scientific, religious and political circles.