The A.N.D.I. National Association of Inventors, was officially founded in 1947, when it was recognized as a non-profit moral authority with the decree of the interim Head of State on 27 August 1947.
The A.N.D.I. is constituted around Mario Tanferna, assistant engineer to professor Vallauri, lieutenant colonel and then general of the 15th Regiment of Military Engineers, associate of Enrico Fermi, as well as philosopher, pupil and then adversary of Benedetto Croce. After taking part in the war of Liberation, he plans, together with the group “The Via Panisperna Boys” of forming an association to gather and protect inventors, so as to encourage the resumption of an innovative activity, important for the economic recovery of the country just come out from the war.
In addition to the collaboration to the economic recovery of Italy, in Tanferna’s vision the collaboration between inventors from all over the world is also important, in the awareness that the inventive activity aimed at overcoming a technical problem does not distinguish between race, religion and ideology , therefore dialogue and knowledge were fundamental in that joint effort that led Tanferna, along with many other Italian brains (including Dante Giacosa, the father of the FIAT 500) to cooperate in the reconstruction of the country.
One of the first successes achieved by A.N.D.I. was the preparation of the Lovett-Lombard Agreements of 1947, (Robert A. Lovett, then Acting Secretary of State, and the Honorable Ivan Matteo Lombardo, then Acting Secretary of the Ministry of Industry) with which a large part of Italy’s war debt to the United States was written off, thanks also to the recognition of requisitions, which then amounted to several billion, of patents obtained in the US by Italian inventors.
In 1978, Dr. Prof. Alessandro Mascioli, researcher and assistant of Tanferna, takes his place as President of ANDI, until his death in 2007. Prof. Mascioli was the promoter of “INVENTECO”, the fair of ecological inventions and innovation aimed at improving the quality of life, with the first edition in 1990.