Arriving in Trieste for the first time one summer in the early seventies, I was struck by how completely the city matched my imagination. Trieste was beautiful—a European capital with cool elegance, genuinely cosmopolitan, and human in scale. Yet beneath that cheerful, tolerant surface of civic well-being lay something darker. The impoverished people crowding the plaza outside the central station, the strikingly high numbers of elderly residents—these could not be ignored.
The city had hidden problems that most residents knew nothing about. The statistics were grim: Trieste had consistently high rates of tuberculosis, suicide (the worst in Italy), alcoholism, and mental illness. It had been a great city for only a brief span—from the mid-eighteenth century to 1918—and the diverse cultures, ethnicities, and traditions that had converged there never fully merged into a unified whole. That very mix had nurtured extraordinary literature; yet the city's underlying anxiety had left the most fragile populations disoriented and sometimes susceptible to a borrowed nationalism, even a fierce chauvinism. Then came a particularly brutal postwar period: strained relations with neighboring regions, the tragedy of the Foibe massacres and Istrian exiles, an economy that had to be rebuilt from scratch, and a climate that could be genuinely harsh.
The solution for Trieste's sharper contradictions and its most awkward cases had always been the great asylum—San Giovanni—a handsome building on a hill overlooking the city. Tree-lined avenues, well-maintained grounds, pleasant architecture: it looked more like a genteel country retreat than a hospital. But inside, patients endured electroshock therapy, lived in degrading conditions, sometimes spent entire days in their own filth, restrained in isolation beds, segregated, stripped of dignity. When Franco Basaglia and his closest colleagues arrived at San Giovanni and decided that asylums should not be reformed but abolished—Trieste would become the first city in the world to close its asylum—the city itself did not respond kindly.
Trieste felt betrayed. The revelations of what happened inside those walls terrified residents, and the ancient prejudice that mental illness equals danger flared up viciously. The slow, virtuous transformation that Basaglia's decision set in motion went largely unheard. The national press, and especially Il Piccolo (the local paper), launched a merciless campaign against him, portraying the risks to citizens, the danger of the reform, and amplifying every negative incident—some truly grave—that occurred. Beyond the press assault came waves of denunciations, lawsuits, cease-and-desist letters. It became clear that people had to listen, that citizens had to understand, or the work would never take root. This meant going everywhere—schools, libraries, neighborhoods, markets—to ask, explain, and listen to painful comments ("I'd execute them all if we had capital punishment here. They're too dangerous"). Without judging, without defending, just listening and responding. A conflictual relationship with the city had begun, yet the city had accepted the debate. In the early stages of Basaglia's revolution, it was not the educated, liberal, cosmopolitan classes who embraced the new direction—as one might have expected—but rather the poorest and most fragile people who became its greatest resource. They felt these patients as neighbors, "in the same boat." Common sense prevailed—never rigid, always pragmatic, as Gramsci taught. And from below, an irreversible path began.