«My April 25th, my liberation, is May 13th. That day, in 1978, Law 180 was passed. Basaglia is my liberator.» Niccolò Scarnato, thirty-seven, stands on the stage of the Aut Art festival at Rome's Teatro degli Eroi with his arms bound in a straitjacket—the very restraint he imagines would have contained him had he been born decades earlier, given his autism. In the film E tu Slegalo, made to honor Franco Basaglia and his revolutionary achievement that we examine in our cover story (marking the centennial of the Venetian doctor's birth), a nurse displays the small jackets once used to restrain children deemed unruly. Niccolò and many others like him in that audience might well have worn them. The festival, organized by the association Siamo delfini—whose work Monica Leggeri describes in these pages—aims to tell and retell the story of autism, to build understanding. Understanding. Scarnato continues his monologue by describing how he remains imprisoned by countless prejudices about people living with autism like himself, and he evokes the specter of new restraints and new segregations.
This is why, as Giulia Galeotti writes, «we have chosen to dedicate these pages of a magazine devoted to fragility and disability to Franco Basaglia: because this Italian doctor accomplished something truly historic—he stopped warehousing the mad, that heterogeneous category defined by stereotype and ignorance alone, in isolation, hidden from the sight of the so-called sane.» An achievement rooted in recognition, participation, and belonging. In a fundamental shift of vision. These dimensions must remain at the heart of Ombre e Luci's work. Because, as Laura Coccia writes, even today, face to face with spasticity like hers (or with Scarnato's autism), «people's eyes follow you, hunt you down—not for your beauty, but as a tangible sign of unasked questions, because society is not ready to question itself, let alone answer.»