The organization that has spent two decades giving a voice to a disease that medicine still struggles to name in time.
On February 14, 2006, while most of Italy was exchanging flowers and chocolates, a group of women volunteers decided to build something more lasting than a holiday. They called it A.P.E., Associazione Progetto Endometriosi, and they started it with a simple, stubborn premise: that a disease affecting one in ten women deserved to be talked about loudly, in piazzas and classrooms and shop windows, until the silence around it broke.
Twenty years later, the silence has not fully broken. But it is cracking.
A Disease That Hides in Plain Sight
Endometriosis is a chronic inflammatory condition in which tissue similar to the lining of the uterus grows outside it, causing pain, inflammation and, in roughly a third of cases, infertility. It affects approximately three million women in Italy and around ten percent of women of reproductive age worldwide. The numbers are likely higher: because the disease has no definitive cure, no prevention protocol, and no simple diagnostic test, it is routinely missed, minimized, or misattributed to other conditions.
The most striking statistic is not the prevalence. It is the delay. Between the onset of symptoms and a confirmed diagnosis, the average wait is between five and eight years. Nearly a decade of unanswered pain, of women being told their cramps are normal, their discomfort is psychological, their suffering is something to be managed rather than investigated.
That gap, A.P.E. has spent two decades trying to close.
Pink Windows and Piazza Tables
This March, as it does every year, A.P.E. has transformed Italy’s Endometriosis Awareness Month into a nationwide campaign. The 12th edition of Vetrine Consapevoli, meaning Aware Shop Windows, sees hundreds of businesses across the country decorating their storefronts in pink and displaying informational materials. It is a low-tech, high-visibility strategy: turn the street itself into a place of information, reaching people who may never have heard the word endometriosis, let alone associated it with their own symptoms.
On the weekend of March 28 and 29, which coincides with World Endometriosis Day, the campaign moves from windows to piazzas. In around forty squares across Italy, volunteers will set up information points and distribute pink gerberas and sunflower seeds. The flowers are not decorative choices. Fragility and resilience together, the organization says: a mirror of the women who live with this disease every day.
Donations collected at these events go directly toward training healthcare professionals, a cornerstone of A.P.E.’s approach. Since its founding, the association has trained over 340 gynecologists, radiologists, and mental health professionals. The logic is straightforward: early diagnosis begins with practitioners who know what they are looking for.
The Work That Remains
Two decades in, the organization is clear-eyed about what has not been achieved. Endometriosis has not been fully incorporated into Italy’s Livelli Essenziali di Assistenza, the national framework of guaranteed healthcare services. Specialized treatment centers remain unevenly distributed across the country. Workplace protections for women with the condition are inadequate. The causes of the disease are still unknown. There is no cure.
A.P.E. does not frame these gaps as failures. It frames them as reasons to continue.
“March is only the beginning,” the organization says. It has been saying something like that for twenty years. Given the progress made and the distance still to travel, it is the right thing to keep saying.
For more information on A.P.E. and its initiatives, visit www.apendometriosi.it. The next awareness events take place on March 28 and 29, 2026, in piazzas across Italy.
