ABSTRACT
Gino Germani's sense of estrangement from the United States increased every time he returned from one of his numerous and frantic trips around the world. "Italy's Dark Evil" was the title of a debate published in the magazine Il Settimanale in October 1974, in which many renowned intellectuals participated, including Germani: Until a short while ago, Italy was not really a nation, it was a bundling together of profoundly different social, cultural and ethnic groups. In Naples, Germani found a humanities faculty that was not so different from the one he had come across in Argentina in the mid-1950s. He believed that a few of the ideas on transpersonal psychology that he had been working on recently had been confirmed. His last words were also his last appeal for the sciences of man: "It is extremely important for the progress of knowledge to study these altered states of consciousness thoroughly and profoundly with scientific instruments and methods".
