Marco Levi Bianchini: A Forgotten Italian Supporter of Parapsychology

Abstract

For different reasons, many of the past Italian psychical researchers are only half known or are completely forgotten today.  This is the case of the neuropsychiatrist Marco Levi Bianchini, who worked in the first half of the 20th century.  Beside his conventional clinical activity, he was engaged in a lot of different topics, but at present he is remembered first of all to have been the first, or one of the first, professionals to introduce and promote psychoanalytic doctrine in Italy.  Levi Bianchini was very interested in, and looked with favour on, metapsychical issues, and in particular psi cognitive phenomena.  He published a few papers on telepathic and precognitive dreams, and he adhered to the ideas that Cazzamalli was developing about some asserted brain radio-emissions that should be able to explain effects such as dowsing, telepathy, and precognition.  More than his original contributions to the parapsychology literature, an undoubted historical merit of Marco Levi Bianchini was his job as a book reviewer, which he performed during all his life, introducing to the academic and psychiatric circles in Italy hundreds of international and national books on parapsychological topics, therefore greatly promoting this culture in the country.