She is an honorary citizen of Baltimore (United States), of La Paz in Bolivia, of Bogotá in Colombia, and Rochefort-du-Gard in France.

But in my heart, looking in the mirror the days of my life, the people I have met in any part of the world, efforts to honor the values I believe in, the choice of medicine as the reason of my life and the desire to spend myself for the youngest patients and less curable, I feel that my parents and the type of education they gave me are the basis of everything I was able to realize and appreciate[3]The Massimo family after the First World War was spread over several continents.

[4] Luisa Massimo's great-grandfather Giovanni Battista Mantovani studied Medicine at the end of the 18th century at the University of Padua, and practiced in Rovigo.

After his death he received great honors, a street and the conference room of the Library of Badia Polesine where he was born were named after him.

In 1933 the father won the tender for the construction of the Institute Giannina Gaslini, defining event for the economy of the family business of building materials.

[10] The journalist and friend Pier Luigi Bagatin of the University Cà Foscari of Venice, writes about the professional choice of Luisa Massimo: One day in 1942, a young girl 14 years old makes a deal with herself under the olive trees on a hill watching the sea and the coast of Portofino.

Few days after, from the Port of Genoa she left for the United States and started to work at the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

After a year in Philadelphia she attended for a month the pediatric ward of The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore.

In 1958 she was assigned by Professor Giovanni De Toni of a scholarship funded by the Italian Ministry of Health, to attend the first International Course of Pediatric Oncology in Paris.

Furthermore, Luisa Massimo spent a short time in the Kinderspital Zürich, where she collaborated with Walter Hitzig testing new drugs such as azathioprine (an immunosuppressant) whose results were published in the leading hematological journal Blood.

[citation needed] She worked as well with Nasrollah Shaidi, a researcher of the University of Wisconsin,[16] in the field of severe bone marrow aplasia.

In 1966 the entrepreneur Dr. Vittorio Rollero and his wife Gianna, because of their 6 years old daughter admitted for leukemia, understood the financial difficulties of the Department, mostly for the heavy costs of drugs.

Since those years, considering also her knowledge of several languages she was invited to teach or to give seminars in several universities in Europe and other continents (Spain, Germany, Nigeria, Brasil, Mexico, Iceland, Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, India, Japan, Australia, China, Ecuador, Jamaica).