This is a book of many dimensions. Nicola Gronchi and Liliana Dell'Osso's La bellezza nella mente (Felici Editore, 2020) insists on a simple but radical claim: any event or person the past offers us must be understood *in context*. The camera's lens, paired with the expertise of serious practitioners, becomes a tool that enriches the central question Gronchi pursues in this striking photographic volume.
Psychiatric institutions have long occupied an urgent place in recent Italian history—especially once they became spaces to erase, as if erasing them might erase the very possibility of human alienation. But we live in an age of dangerous forgetfulness: we read the past without grounding it in its own time, we focus obsessively on the present while sweeping away everything that made it possible. Even the hard-won civic advances. And Dell'Osso warns that this impulse costs us: it means losing the threads that make meaning, and losing the chance to understand who we really are.
Read also — Franco Basaglia: The Ferryman's Story
Liliana Dell'Osso, director of the Psychiatric Clinic at the University of Pisa, offers here—alongside contributions from psychiatrist Primo Lorenzi—a clear map of the terrain we know simply as "the closure of the asylums." It is a history with hidden folds. In the second half of the last century, this shift marked a fundamental change in how we approached mental illness, restoring to the sick a dignity the asylum had nearly destroyed. Yet that dignity itself had a history. In the Enlightenment eighteenth century—drawing in turn on religiously-founded institutions of care—those once dismissed as mad "for reasons beyond human comprehension" came to be seen instead as *ill*, and therefore worthy of treatment. The early scientific studies that would become modern psychiatry found their ground in these very places, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet good intentions proved insufficient. Those same institutions became, paradoxically, what Franco Basaglia called in 1970 "a factory producing patients in their own image—justifying and guaranteeing the therapeutic methods on which they built their practice." Methods so contemptuous of human freedom that their replacement became not just desirable but urgent. It required something harder still: a legal ban on reusing those structures for any psychiatric purpose that risked segregating people on the basis of mental illness alone.
Against this background, Gronchi's photographs speak with startling force. In stark black and white, they document what remains of Italy's psychiatric hospitals, abandoned beginning in 1978 with the passage of Law 180—the landmark legislation bearing the name of Franco Basaglia, the psychiatrist who died forty years ago. For Gronchi, this was less a professional assignment than a pilgrimage. He wanted to understand, and to bear witness to, the human catastrophe that emerged when he saw a television documentary about an investigation conducted by Senator Ignazio Marino beginning in 2010. As head of a parliamentary commission, Marino had gone to see what remained of Italy's judicial psychiatric hospitals—the ones still "operating." What he found was a complete collapse of any system worthy of the name: detainees living in conditions beneath those of animals. These institutions, like their civilian counterparts, should have been closed. But the transition to real places of care proved far harder than anyone had anticipated. The regional governments, which under the new National Health Service (established that same year, 1978) were supposed to build community mental health services, largely failed to do so. The patients "discharged" (Lorenzi notes the significance of this newly coined term) were left to fend for themselves or depend on families already fractured by poverty and neglect.
The photographs strike hard. They show once-beautiful, prestigious institutions; methods that degraded and alienated; traces of the humans who lived there. And they expose a wound we have never fully healed—one that, as Marino warns, we risk reopening in other places, the ones we now use to identify and expel other humans, those fleeing futures without hope.