«Could Basaglia's law be enacted today?» Giulia Galeotti asks, with a note of discouragement, during the presentation of her edited book about the new life of Italy's former asylums: The Impossible Becomes Possible (Castelvecchi 2024). The title echoes a phrase from Franco Basaglia, the psychiatric reformer to whom the text is dedicated. The lively audience present shakes its head in unison. The times we live in, Galeotti reflects, seem to be questioning achievements we thought we could count on for our children—we must instead prepare ourselves to resist genuine reversals. Like the one Massimo Gramellini denounced that same day in his daily column in Corriere della Sera, commenting on events in Argentina, where President Milei has mandated the return of terms like idiot, retarded, and imbecile to describe degrees of cognitive disability.
«Words that wound human dignity,» adds Dorota Swat, translator and moderator of the book presentation, held at the Franco Basaglia Municipal Library in Rome, in the Primavalle neighborhood. It is one of the city's library network branches—«a community asset» that, as Galeotti notes, preserves treasures often lost elsewhere. It is the sort of library that brings light to Rome's periphery, offering welcoming spaces where people meet, study, and exchange ideas—places worth visiting and supporting.
We are in a lesser-known part of Rome: Vatican territory ceded to private developers in the late nineteenth century, it saw its popular urban development through fascist borgate—housing built in the 1930s for those displaced from the historic center by the new street plan around St. Peter's. A rationalist imprint, on a small scale, echoes the Eur district: the main artery of Via Federico Borromeo cuts straight across the ridge, joining two partially arcaded squares fronted by two churches. On the flanks, toward the center and toward the periphery, construction was far less ordered. A sign of public commitment interrupted by plans for road connections that the center city had already abandoned. There was a time when residents organized themselves with so-called reverse strikes to complete essential streets. The neighborhood has, then, interesting architectural qualities and became the backdrop for neorealist and modern films; today it hosts striking street art—Solo's Wonder Woman, Diavù's Ingrid Bergman. A perfect context, then, for presenting a book like this—not just because of the library's name, but because of the fragility and resilience that emanate from the neighborhood itself.
The times we live in seem to be questioning achievements we thought we could count on for our children
The Basaglia Library sits not far from one of the former psychiatric institutions described in the essay: Santa Maria della Pietà, the capital's sprawling asylum until 1999. The book unfolds across an itinerary that travels through Italy, stopping not only in Rome but in Aversa and Venice, Trieste and Florence—also Cremona, Potenza, Naples, Palermo, Lucca, Ferrara, and Turin. Cities whose streets host former psychiatric hospitals once designed to confine and hide the mentally ill from the gaze of the healthy. Impossible places of care, once emptied, these buildings—possessing undeniable historical and often architectural merit—have given way to new life: gardens and community spaces, theatrical and craft enterprises, public health services and university departments, museums and community gardens.
The essay collects articles from the Four Pages section of L'Osservatore Romano, and features on its cover a sculpture by Italian-Puerto Rican artist Borinquen Gallo to remind us how what is discarded can acquire new value when seen with the right and creative eye. These pages tell the story of the possibility of creating life «where there was once closure, deprivation, and death», writes Don Virginio Colmegna in his introduction. Experiences worth highlighting because «they produce a good not confined to individual concern,» in the knowledge that when «around every person a village is built—relationships, contexts of proximity where people take responsibility for each other's difficulties, suffering, and loneliness with shared responsibility and inclusive solidarity»—we all benefit.
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In the text, we discover how revolutionary Basaglia's work has been through various cultural perspectives—literature, painting, cinema: cultural viewpoints, Colmegna emphasizes, that are alone capable of countering the political and moral regression demanding new forms of containment and repression against what is different, deviant, and dissenting. A regression fed also by the failure to fully develop Law 180, as Galeotti notes in the chapter Memory and Future: while the law's institutional dismantling—closing the asylum and replacing it with genuine care for the mentally ill—was indeed realized, its constructive part, which should have followed and completed the first, entrusted to regional and local authorities («and time was not lacking,» the author added in the discussion), fell far short. The collective journey narrated in multiple voices—an apt expression of the need for different perspectives—carries us through the more or less realized attempts at therapeutic communities, recalled by Giovanni Cerro, which inspired Basaglia's revolution and which he envisioned replacing the institution as places where «the principle of freedom» could overtake «the authority of the asylum».
What was realized was only the institutional dismantling; the constructive part, entrusted to the regions, fell far short and proved deeply disappointing
What was realized was only the institutional dismantling; the constructive part, entrusted to the regions, fell far short and proved deeply disappointingThe book's final pages expand both space and time: from Trieste in those years, as described by Nicla Bettazzi, to Brazil—recounted by Alicia Lopes Araújo—which came to know the psychiatrist through important conferences in 1979 that marked a «crucial moment» for Brazilian and international psychiatry. It concludes with Don Sergio Massironi, who reads between the lines of a Gospel passage in its eternal relevance, illuminating a community conscience that faces the problem's complexity without fear and decides to act—together—against the evil that division represents, both in the person and in the community. It is good to find all this fixed here, in memory of what humanly can become possible.