Alzheimer’s, a person, a family, a community

Saturday, October 23, 2021, Lionello Bonfanti Business Center, a meeting about Alzheimer’s disease and Ivo Cilesi, pedagog, theraputic musician and creator of non-pharmacological therapies for Alzheimer patients.

“The idea,” says Sandra Della Bella, president of the Salve Association, and Promoter of the conference, “was born a few years ago, before the arrival of Covid-19, when a friend of the association accidentally got to know Ivo Cilesi and his family at a beach in Liguria, Italy. A beautiful friendship began and also the desire to collaborate with Loppiano.”

Some projects have already begun, and new ones are being planned. Then came the pandemic and on March 2, 2020, Dr Cilesi became one of its victims at the age of 61. Some months later, the dream of collaboration resurfaced in the form of a conference with help from some of his relatives, and thanks to the relationships that had been built with the Salve Association, with experts and professionals from Valdarno, in the field of Alzheimer’s and non-drug therapies.

The conference will focus on the family, which often finds itself overwhelmed by the duties of care and the threat of isolation when the illness surfaces. But it will also examine the possible role that the community could play, as Sandara Della Bella explaines: “In addition to highlighting the clinical aspects of the pathology of Alzheimer’s and its impact on the family, we would like to present Dr Ivo Cilesi, and focus on the community as a resource, in responding to the challenge that Alzheimer’s disease imposes by intruding on our time.”

The meeting is being promoted by the Salve Association-Health to Share, a non-profit organization based in the Lionello Bonfanti Center, as part of the WE HERE Generative Relations Project. The project continues to raise awareness about many aspects of health issues that have been raised in the past. It is supported by the Municipality of Figline and Incisa Valdarno, which has provided patronage, by the Bank of the Valdarno and by FarmaValdarno as sponsors.

A Green Pass is required to attend the event. The event can also be followed live on Youtube: HERE

The program can be downloaded HERE.

About Ivo Cilesi:

Psycho-pedagogist and music therapist, Genovese by birth but Bergamo by adoption, Ivo Cilesi is famous for developing innovative non-drug therapies for Alzheimer’s patients, which have made him an international point of reference. Among these, for example, Doll Therapy, using a doll named “Gully” to help decrease the agitation and aggression that are common to people with Alzheimer’s disease. There is also the train, which earned him the nickname “Doctor Train” by simulating a train journey, inside a room set up like a train carriage, allowing the therapist to enter into a relationship with patients and discover their world. Cilesi told Repubblica.it in 2017: “For the patient, these trips are real, they have lost their cognitive, semantic, procedural memory, but the emotional memory and the love remain.”