The Mad Woman of Piazza Giudia | A Review

June 1928: Acting on a complaint, the police commissioner at Porta Pia ordered the admission of a fifteen-and-a-half-year-old girl to the psychiatric hospital of Santa Maria della Pietà. The "degenerate," the "moral lunatic" (as she was labeled in her clinical file), would be admitted four times in total. Her name was Elena Di Porto. Her only crime was having an exuberant, nonconforming temperament. Reconstructed by Gaetano Petraglia, the life of this Jewish woman—born in 1912 in Rome's ancient Ghetto, mother of two, dead at Auschwitz—is a story of courage, of resistance to bullying and injustice, of love (Elena could have saved herself from the roundup of October 16, 1943). It is also an indictment of the horror of Italy's asylum system, which Franco Basaglia would dismantle—a man whose centennial birthday falls this very year.