During his visit to Trieste last July 7 for the Catholic Social Week, Pope Francis himself encountered it in person. And why not — this year marks the centenary of Franco Basaglia's work, and Marco Cavallo has been everywhere. A new one appeared in March at San Salvi, the former psychiatric hospital in Florence: the Chille de la balanza theater company (founded by Claudio Ascoli) donated to the city a Marco Cavallo inspired by Leonardo da Vinci's design for the Sforza, five meters tall and eight meters long, made of recycled plastic. Crowdfunded through the Produzioni dal basso-Banca Etica project, it now stands in the meadow alongside the Rome-Florence railway line. A spectacular Marco Cavallo had appeared shortly before at the Viareggio Carnival, crafted from papier-mâché and covered in luminous flowers — more than 100 roses and 6,000 leaves — signed by Carlo and Lorenzo Lombardi and titled The Scent of Roses in the Thorns. Not beside the thorns, but within them: within pain and fragility. But who are these great steeds, and what do they represent?
To answer, we must step back in time and place. To Trieste in 1959, when a flesh-and-blood horse began hauling the laundry cart and refuse within the city's psychiatric hospital. After a long and faithful service, the administration decided to put it down and replace it with a motorized truck. But the patients rebelled. They wrote to the provincial president, Michele Zanetti, asking not for slaughter but for "dignified retirement, earned through labor and the affection of patients and staff alike." In exchange, they offered money and pledged to care for the animal at their own expense until its natural death. It was the first time people locked inside a psychiatric hospital had appealed directly to authority as citizens with rights: their request was granted.
Meanwhile, at San Giovanni Hospital, a paid work cooperative took shape for patients. In 1972, an artist and writer named Giuliano Scabia launched a workshop. With the help of many — including artist Vittorio Basaglia, Franco himself, and physician Beppe Dell'Acqua — doctors, nurses, and patients created a Marco Cavallo together from wood, cardboard, and papier-mâché. Four meters of blue horse, mouth wide open, head held high, long neck, legs poised and fitted with wheels so it could move. A living testimony that freedom heals. Inside its belly sits a small door where anyone in the city — any of the mad — could place their dreams, their thoughts, their words, their treasures, finally to carry them out into the world.
But once finished, they discovered Marco Cavallo was too large. It couldn't leave the hospital; it wouldn't fit through the gate. Basaglia solved the problem the way he solved everything: he grabbed a cast-iron bench and smashed an opening in the boundary wall. The great blue horse could finally begin its gallop through the streets of Trieste, becoming the symbol of an epochal, peaceful, colorful revolution — one that let the mad become human beings again. For more than fifty years, this traveling theatrical machine has galloped from festival to concert, from conference to celebration, witnessing a transformation that still demands our support to be truly complete. Especially now, as distress and fragility surge again in alarming silence, as the old paradigm of secrecy and isolation returns, as families are left entirely to fend for themselves. Yet Marco Cavallo keeps moving through the world, embodying the right to exist, to live in society, to be a citizen. It embodies the necessity of standing together — the supposedly healthy and the supposedly ill — across a border that cannot be drawn because it does not exist. What exists are people, with their difficulties, yes, but also their gifts and capacities.