Origin and history of MondoSole

MondoSole was birthed first and foremost from the personal experience of ChiaraSole Ciavatta, who after suffering from anorexia, bulimia, binge eating, and depression for a lot of years (actually from her birth until around the year 2000), decided, after her recovery (but especially after so many useless courses of treatment that had failed to understand the essence of these pathologies) to make her experience and sensitivity as a formerly ill person available to others, to help those suffering from the same pathologies that she had known and dealt with first-hand, and to offer what only an formerly ill person can fully understand.

From this desire to help others, she began her voluntary work: she opened her website (www.chiarasole.it), published her autobiography book, and began to receive thousands of e-mails from sick people and desperate families, exhausted by inadequate or ineffective treatment, who asked her for help, and to whom she offered her attention, understanding, and support.

Hence MondoSole was born. The next step was the opening, together with Dr. Matteo Mugnani, the MondoSole Centre in Rimini, which has become the natural container of this project, and which since 2004 has followed, day by day, 12 months a year, several hundred people and families, combining the specialized clinical services of various professionals with the voluntary work of Chiara who, strengthened by her own direct experience and subsequent training as a voluntary social worker, spends her time every to guiding, and advising in the long and complex path of rehabilitation and social and emotional reintegration that is necessary to come out of anorexic-bulimic self-neglection.

Around the MondoSole Centre a series of flats have sprung up spontaneously in which the Centre’s guests spend some of their time. These flats constitutes a valuable resource capable of accommodating them for the time necessary for a journey at MondoSole and constitutes the vital nucleus of a group in which the personal history of each person is the heritage of all, the progress of the individual becomes a resource shared with others and an example that allows understanding, change, opening up to unhoped-for possibilities and modifying pathological mental patterns.

Alongside the work to treat anorexia, bulimia, and binge eating, a further service has arisen to help family members (parents, spouses, and partners), through support groups for parents and spouses, and help paths for parents and spouses, which is also active on Saturdays to be able to welcome and respond to the needs of families who are forced to move geographically from other parts of Italy.

For the English translation:

with the support of Giacomo Giuggioli: Director of My English School Rimini

Click to download Chiara’s autobiographical book written in 2002 in english version CHIARASOLE ANOREXIA AND BULIMIA AN EXPERIENCE OF LIFE AND DEATH. FOREWORD BY GIANNA SCHELOTTO.