"It was a revolution. A class revolution. The most important to take
place in Italy. It gave people back their souls, their faces, even their
clothes – and they had been deprived of everything."
-Enzo Quai
"People asked me: “What do you want to change? It’s not possible.’ But, day by day, things changed. Then they asked me. “Where are you going with this?” and I said, “I don’t know.” And it was true. I didn’t know."
-Franco Basaglia
A photo from Gorizia in 1965 captures the situation inside the
psychiatric hospital in the city before journalists and photographers
arrived to spread the word. The caption reads ‘Self-portrait: 1965.
Ward B.’ There are forty or so men in shot, some standing, some
sitting. They look a bit like a football team or a school class
inexplicably comprised entirely of grown-ups. Franco Basaglia can be
seen in the middle of image, in a shirt, jacket and tie. His colleague
Antonio Slavich is nearby. A few nurses also seem to be present,
in white coats. The rest are patients. The group is on the steps of
one of the hospital’s buildings, in the sun. Few people had heard of
Gorizia or Franco Basaglia in 1965, but by 1968 this would become
a celebrated and exalted place, a hotbed of change, an extraordinary
example of ‘an overturned institution’, somewhere that was soon
‘idealized and mythologized’. It was the last place where you might
think about starting a revolution.
But Basaglia took the job [in 1961, as Director], and within eight years Gorizia was to become the most famous mental asylum in Italy, if not in Europe. It was here that a spark was lit, leading to a movement that would undermine the very basis of all such ‘total institutions’. Nobody expected this outcome in 1961, certainly not the provincial authorities that had employed him, nor Basaglia himself. Most asylum directors at the time simply managed the situation they inherited. Many were failed academics. Very few tried to implement any kind of change at all. In this, as in so many other things, Franco Basaglia was very dig erent to the rest. The
‘revolution’ in Gorizia took place almost by chance. If Basaglia had gone somewhere else, the asylum there would probably have remained as it was.
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