Ludovica's Exam
A few months ago, a letter arrived at our offices. It was from Ludovica's grandmother, writing with considerable (and well-founded!) pride about her granddaughter's middle school exam—an exam made uncertain and difficult "because of the coronavirus."
The daughter of deaf parents, Ludovica chose to write her final thesis on a topic close to home. Her teacher encouraged her to draw on her own experience. The result was Beyond the Obstacle, a work that, as her grandmother saw it, marked "a journey that strengthened her" and covered every subject area. She began with sign language—Italian Sign Language (LIS)—recognized as an official language in February 1988, a bridge "between the silence of deaf people and the hearing world." Not all deafness is the same, so the thirteen-year-old examined the difference between deafness from birth and acquired deafness. After explaining the auditory system, Ludovica presented Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C. (see photo below)—the only university in the world run by deaf people for deaf people—and the tech revolution in Silicon Valley that had fully embraced the deaf community. Then came Hitler's notorious T4 program and the birth of the Paralympics after the war. She concluded with the life of Bebe Vio, before finishing with Pope Francis's message for World Disability Day 2019. "Well done, Ludovica," her grandmother wrote. "You truly went Beyond the Obstacle!"
Ludovica's work is a thoughtful and curious account of disability—one that explores its lesser-known dimensions. Credit belongs partly to the author's lived experience, but the fact that a teenager chose to immerse herself in something that touches her own parents so directly shows how Ludovica's family has managed to embody all the light hidden behind the shadow that seems to obscure everything else. Her thesis also challenges—an idea very dear to Ombre e Luci—the idea that disability is monolithic. Modern societies still lump together all forms of disability (physical, mental, congenital, acquired), as if they shared nothing but a common label of lack. As Miguel Benasayag has written, "disability is an extreme form of labeling: it designates all those defined by their deficiency."
Between Welcome and Segregation
Ludovica lives in an age when most Western countries have laws that protect and support people with disabilities in ways once unimaginable—yet this legal progress finds little echo in how society actually treats them. The result is a profound fracture: the way we conceive of and define disabled people tests the very idea of what it means to be human. What defines us? Intelligence? Heart? Productivity? Capacity for relationship?
Behind this gap between law and practice lies a long and complicated history. A history that contains many smaller histories within it—the history of mental disability differs from that of physical disability. There are legal histories, philosophical histories, histories of advocacy movements, of schooling. But what we want to emphasize in this essay is that what we live with today—for better and worse—did not spring from nowhere, nor has it remained unchanged. There has been a long and uneven path, marked as always by history's mixture of progress and setback.
In antiquity, the dominant rule was the rejection of disability. A rejection theorized by Lycurgus and Seneca and carried out at Mount Taygetus in Sparta and the Tarpeian Rock in Rome—consistent with the Law of the Twelve Tables, which decreed that "a newborn visibly deformed must be killed at once." Here, too, the coming of Christianity changed things radically, offering new ideas both in theory ("Neither he nor his parents sinned") and in practice.
The Church began to actively care for people with disabilities starting in the tenth and eleventh centuries, when—following the model of leper houses—free institutions arose to provide shelter. Yet immediately a contradiction emerged: alongside consolation, these institutions took on a second function: separation.
For centuries, the oscillation between welcome and segregation, service and repression saw the latter dominate—sometimes gently, sometimes harshly. The prevailing idea was that disabled people did not belong to the normal world. So we isolated them, pushed them to the margins, excluded them, confined them to the spaces of deviance. We treated marginalization and isolation as conditions naturally suited to them. Yet then as now, this way of looking at them is what created and continues to create disability.
— Read also: Jesus's Response by Marco Bove
Medicine Enters the Picture
It was the Renaissance that introduced another factor, one that could help or else deepen oppression: medicine. For the first time, the idea of cure appeared—something utterly new when compared to, say, the leper house, where the sick were shut away but not treated. So the claim that the psychiatric hospital was invented in the nineteenth century does not hold up. Behind it lay at least two and a half centuries of prior practice. And while we today rightly insist that disability is not a disease, the fact that medicine eventually took an interest in it was a genuine step forward.
Another pattern that emerges in this period is the implicit link between poverty and madness. In the sixteenth-century model, because early institutions were free and open to men and women marked by destitution and certain behaviors (the so-called signa furoris—scandal, disrespect for authority, danger to self or others), the psychiatric hospital became by definition a place for the poor. Only from the seventeenth century onward did people with disabilities of all kinds begin to enter, regardless of income, responding to demands from individuals, institutions, and families across all social classes.
Maria and a Camping Trip That Made History
It is in the modern era that society's ambivalence toward disability reaches a peak. Medicine was now engaged on a large scale with vulnerable people—yet eugenics crashed in like a boulder, obsessed with racial "improvement," translating into vicious laws that remained in force until recently.
Again, it comes down to emphasis. Italian law number 36 of 1904, for instance, grounded involuntary commitment in "social danger" and "public scandal." Admission to the asylum was not due to the person's pathological state or disability, but to their dangerousness, idleness, and capacity to disturb social order. Naturally, these institutions lacked any tool for understanding, listening to, or welcoming disability. This held true despite growing attention to the subject, thanks partly to the rise of two new disciplines: orthopedics in the physical and motor domains, and neuropsychiatry in the mental and behavioral ones.
But the ambivalence did not fade—it intensified. Some spoke of education and integration, yet the association between mental or physical difference and crime and deviance grew stronger. Why?
Because from the French Revolution onward, anyone who did not work and fight was useless—worse, a liability. And since secularization meant the Church no longer handled welfare, care, and education, a new question arose: "Who pays?" So, across all political and cultural contexts, the decision to help someone with a disability came to be presented as one that impoverishes the collective, diverting resources from the productive to the nonproductive. These are parameters we recognize. "The taxes I pay," a woman named Francesca wrote on Twitter one December day, "go to give ten hours of care a day to a child who, as an adult, might manage to move a ball from his right hand to his left. My normal son doesn't get even a minute of gym class." Italy, December 2020.
For all its differences, this logic echoes the climate that preceded the T4 operation by decades—the large-scale murder of people with disabilities conceived and carried out by the Nazis. The final count was roughly 250,000 people killed, including 5,000 children. Yet Germany was not alone in this crime. Other nations followed.
After the Eugenetics Record Office was founded in 1905 by the Englishman Francis Galton, eugenics became law in many countries (with the paradoxical exception of Britain itself). Take the case of Maria Nordin from Sweden, from a poor and illiterate family. Classified as blind and locked in a reformatory, at eighteen she agreed to sterilization as the price of release. When a landowner hired her, she went to an eye doctor who found she had severe myopia—a condition correctable with glasses. "You took away my right to have children," she asked the Minister of Health, "simply because I couldn't afford to see an eye doctor?" Her case was one of many enabled by laws in Sweden (until 1976), Norway, Finland, Denmark, Austria, Iceland, the Swiss canton of Vaud, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere. The reach and persistence of these eugenics laws explains why, after World War II, the Allied courts did not classify forced sterilization as a crime against humanity.
After 1945, declarations and constitutions proclaimed equality of rights and opportunity for all citizens, yet it would take longer still before people with disabilities were truly included. Things began to shift in the 1960s, when disability found a place in the civil rights movements. Here too, the momentum came from the United States.
What About Italy?
Even the most critical historians agree that the Church's presence played a decisive role in preventing eugenics legislation in our country, where moreover Catholic associations developed a range of initiatives absent elsewhere. It is also true that when my parents lived in Toronto for a time in the 1970s, they were struck by how many people with disabilities were visible in public. Obviously the absolute numbers were not different, but in Italy at that time, disabled people were mostly kept at home. Much still does not work well in our country today—schools, workplaces, care services, and the Church's attitude (Pope Francis gave the Church a sharp rebuke in his message for World Disability Day 2020). Yet we are among the Western nations with the most advanced disability laws: "True, law is not substance," as Massimiliano Fiorucci has written, "but culturally and civically it means something."
Laws like Law 517 of 1977, which closed segregated classrooms. Laws 180 and 833 of 1978, which—thanks to Franco Basaglia—dismantled the asylums and regulated involuntary psychiatric treatment, establishing public mental health services. And Law 104 of 1992. As Clara Sereni wrote, Law 180 remains to this day the only Italian law where a cultural, political, and scientific vanguard became state law—and it still sets the standard around the world. Yet in the country that created it, the law has been only partially implemented, sometimes even twisted, so that the great challenge of closing the asylums often simply moved the asylum into the family home, left entirely alone in daily reality. Much the same could be said of schools, workplaces, and more.
Perhaps the problem is that these laws reflect no overarching vision of disability, but rather are measures forced by public pressure at particular moments? Likely. More recently they have led to the "after my death" law (2016) and, precisely during the terrible time of COVID-19, to a new fund for implementing provisions that explicitly recognize and protect the rights of curacari—the wonderful term coined by Flavio Pagano—those who give daily care to a fragile family member.
— Read also: Marco Cavallo by Nicla Bettazzi
What's the Verdict?
What conclusions can we draw from this survey? Obviously the optimist and pessimist will reach different answers—that timeless question of the glass half full or half empty. On one hand, undeniable progress has been made. Many rights have been recognized, and a new way of seeing disability is spreading, including crucial shifts in language itself. On the other hand, practice does not follow. For one thing, securing what the law already guarantees is a daily struggle—hard work, patience, persistence. The fatigue is crushing. Then there is a hardness, a refusal that economic, health, and social crises do not soften. They make it worse. And there remains that old reading of exclusion, non-belonging, and uselessness.
But today we are more mature, more aware, more human. There is Francesca on Twitter. There are many who speak out online and in the streets. But—beyond the laws—there are also many who see differently, who look with fresh eyes. A shared feeling is slowly spreading, making room at last for the light in a history too long seen only as shadow.