LA CIVETTA February 2016 | Page 10

LA REPUBBLICA DEI MATTI

In 2008, I found myself in Trieste. I was there to study Italy’s divided memory. I had heard of Franco Basaglia, and I knew a little about the story of the 1978 law, but in general my knowledge was pretty basic about the mental health system in Italy and its transformation. By chance, it was the thirtieth anniversary of the law that year and a series of events were being held to commemorate and discuss those events. My interest was piqued by a film showing at a small cinema in the city – the title was San Clemente, directed by the French photographer Raymond Depardon. The audience was small. It was a late screening. Introducing the film was somebody called Peppe dell’Acqua, whom I had never heard of (I later discovered that he was an extremely important person in the story I would tell). The next ninety minutes shocked me to the core. Shot in the late 1970s, the documenztary was an account of the last days of one of Venice’s island asylums after the Basaglia law had been passed. It showed people with severe problems, and it also showed an institution struggling to change. It was an uncompromising account. I was hooked. I never forgot that evening. I knew, from that moment on, that I had to study that period in history, those institutions and the way that they changed.

Since then, I have been on a journey that has ended with this book. This journey was made possible by the Wellcome Trust, which first funded an exploratory tour of Italy through a small grant that allowed me to visit Trieste, Arezzo, Rome, Imola and Venice. On these first visits I began to understand something about the role of Franco Basaglia, and also about those places called ‘manicomi’, which had once housed the ‘mentally ill’. In 2009 I put in a much bigger application for a Wellcome Trust Research Grant, which was eventually successful. Since then, I have immersed myself in stories of patients, nurses, psychiatrists and anti-psychiatrists, electro-shock treatment and anti-psychotic drugs, reform, revolution and counter-reform, and the language of mental illness. This journey has taken me across Italy (and beyond – to New York, for example) and brought me into contact with an extraordinary array of people.

This has been a difficult and complex book, which has, at times, (literally) given me nightmares. I have read about torture, suicide, suffering and terrible illness. But it is also a story of liberation and radical change, against all odds. Much of what is in this book is inspiring, and it certainly inspired me. This story shows that a small group of people can change the world. When Franco Basaglia and Antonio Slavich began to dismantle Gorizia’s asylum from the inside in the early 1960s, nobody took any notice. Every step was a battle, every patient untied was a struggle. But by the end of the 1960s, people were flocking to Gorizia to see how a ‘total institution’ had been overturned. This book tells the story of this ‘revolution’, warts and all – because if a historian doesn’t dig around in the dirt, what kind of historian is he?

La Civetta is very excited to include a short introductory extract from Professor John Foot's most recent book on Italy's asylum history, "La Repubblica dei Matti."