The extreme difficulty of culturing in vitro parasites from Italian causes of cutaneous leishmaniasis (CL) has so far been a handicap to their biochemical identification. A technique based on the "transient growth" of promastigotes originating from parasites visceralized in LHC inbred hamsters was used. Through this technique, promastigote extracts of seven Leishmania isolates from CL cases from the Abruzzi region were obtained. Isoenzyme profiles of these isolates and reference strains of L. tropica, L. major and L. infantum were compared using 11 enzymes (ASAT, PGM, GPI, 6PGD, G6PD, ME, MDH, MPI, IDH, NH1 and NH2). Six isolates differed from L. infantum in one enzyme only (NH1), and one isolate was indistinguishable from L. infantum for all enzymes tested.