We have read about him, watched him, listened to his words—his own voice or accounts of his life. Black-and-white RAI documentaries. Audio recordings. Television specials tracing his biography in installments. Yet when Ombre e Luci decided to devote these pages to Franco Basaglia, seizing the occasion of his centennial in this complicated year of 2024, it was for a simple reason: this Italian doctor accomplished something genuinely historic. He ended the segregation of "the mad"—that heterogeneous category defined by stereotype and ignorance—keeping them separate, invisible, removed from the sight of "the sane."
Two things matter first: "Listen and speak." Knowledge is the key to encounter, to respect, and even to mutual exchange and enrichment. Through the passage of Law 180, which led to the closure of Italy's asylums, Basaglia made this possible: people with mental disorders, people with complex and varied forms of disability, people who were uncomfortable or chaotic or difficult—they could finally be seen. And therefore thought about, heard, accompanied. A hard and winding path that brought them from the status of unwanted to that of citizens.
Basaglia focused on the control that psychiatry exercised over populations, especially the poor—those masses of the economically, socially, and politically "undesirable," because they did not produce, did not follow social order, did not obey.
Two things matter first: "Listen and speak." Knowledge is the key to encounter, to respect, and even to mutual exchange and enrichment.
Two things matter first: "Listen and speak."
Knowledge is the key to encounter, to respect, and even to mutual exchange and enrichment.
In The Best of Youth (Marco Tullio Giordana, 2003), Matteo asks his brother Nicola, a psychiatrist in the seventies, who the man in the photograph is. "My teacher, Franco Basaglia!" Nicola replies. "Ah, the one who wants to free all the madmen." Then Nicola tells him about a doctor for whom "the sick are not prisoners, but people, and mental illness is not a sin to be expiated."
With this in mind, let us try to understand who Franco Basaglia was, what he imagined and wanted, and what our task should be today. Because fragility, mental health, and disability still remain the concern of only some. Yet suffering, need, and struggle—once they step beyond the threshold of a home or a territory—touch us all. They concern all of us. A cultural, social, and political shift can take root only in a new sense of community. A community that knows how to care for the person in front of it as a concrete subject. It means imagining a community that cares, a community as a place of listening, welcome, and possible reintegration: the key is to begin with relationship, involving the individual and their family network. Because we win only together. Otherwise we all lose. Still. Always.
In the months after Law 180 passed, Franco Basaglia chartered a plane to take former asylum inmates on a brief flight over Trieste: "the great ferryman" (as Alda Merini called him) wanted them to see from above the city they had been barred from inhabiting for decades. "That flight, that vision, that capacity to dare the impossible," Franco Lorenzoni wrote, "is what we need so that we can return to earth and to our daily lives, and take personal responsibility for ourselves. Transforming our educational practices is urgent and necessary, because the knowledge we need does not yet exist and must be developed in as many contexts as possible." Ombre e Luci begins precisely here.