Comunità Incontro

Comunità Incontro is an Italian drug rehabilitation facility founded by Pierino Gelmini, an Italian Catholic priest, on 13 February 1963. The facility, which is based in Amelia, Italy, received substantial backlash following Gelmini's 1971 arrest on charges of fraud, as well as further accusations of child sexual abuse by Gelmini before his death in 2014.

Founding

Gelmini's experiences in Rome prompted his creation of the drug rehabilitation group in Amelia when Gelmini purchased an abandoned mill and refurbished it to serve as a community therapy house after a personal encounter with an 18-year-old victim of a drug addiction lying in the middle of a street gutter.

Comunità Incontro successfully expanded into a veritable network of services dedicated to the addicted and their varieties of social problems. At the beginning of the 1990s, Gelmini volunteered to be injected with an experimental AIDS vaccine in a study dedicated to finding an approach to dealing with HIV. Having established its first foreign center in 1987, the organization had grown to encompass more than two hundred chapters around the world by the late 2000s, including a number outside Italy and as far away as South America and Asia. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi presented a speech on the occasion of Gelmini's birthday in January 2005. The politician Maurizio Gasparri characterized him as "one of the few heroes of our time." Mass media reports worldwide have described Gelmini as politically well-connected.