Group’s history

città di roma european hospitalcastello orsini hotel

The history of the Garofalo Group is a history that starts long time ago, in the post-war far-off period, when Italy was a shattered country, with an uncertain future. Raffaele Garofalo was a young idealist pursuing a dream he strongly believed in: becoming a great surgeon. Right after graduating he went to the Military Hospital of Naples as a volunteer where he performed his first surgical operations. From Naples to Rome, passing by Ripe San Ginesio, Raffaele’s early dream finally came true and, together with his brothers, at the end of the fifties he took over the management of the private hospital where he was used to work with great determination, the Sant'Antonio of Padua nursing home in Colle Oppio. The sixties started a phase of economic and social transformation of Italy, an agricultural country becoming a modern nation, with an “exponential increase of the industrial sector”; on this background, the Garofalo family made a step forward, giving birth to a big entrepreneurial group. After buying a land In Monteverde area, the building of a new clinic began. The Casa di Cura Città di Roma was so born. In the following decade, known as the ”Years of lead”, in spite of such a negative scenario, the Garofalo Group that, till that moment, had invested in an anti-cyclical field, achieved great results as a fully successful company. It was so decided to diversify the resources investing also in hotel sector and the Park Hotel Residence Blanc et Noir, the Residence Ponte Bianco and the Park Hotel Residence Rouge et Noir were born. At the same time, was bought the Castello di Nerola, which was meant to become one of the ten most beautiful hotels in the world. In the eighties, the Garofalo Group kept on steadily growing in the sanitary sector. Therefore, it was the Aurelia Hospital, the European Hospital and the Casa di Cura Samadi’s turn. In the nineties, the Group bought Videouno，a local television station broadcasting in the whole Lazio and part of the Tuscany. It was turned into Telesalute, the first monothematic European broadcasting station exclusively focused on health. Today, Telesalute has become IES TV - Information and health.
At the end of the nineties and at the beginning of 2000, Garofalo Group, chaired by its founder Raffaele Garofalo, started a healthy territorial diversification, purchasing sanitary structures located in several regions of the Northern Italy. So it was the turn of the Eremo di Miazzina in Verbania, the Hesperia Hospital in Modena, the Villa Berica in Vicenza and the Villa Garda in Garda. A growing process that, even after the great loss suffered by the Group with the death of its founder in February 2006, was carried out with the purchase of the Casa di Cura Rugani in Siena and of the Casa di Cura Villa Von Siebenthal in Genzano of Rome.