Abandoned psychiatry in Italy: insanely beautiful

It always pulls her back here. Even if Novella Limite then asks how that fits together, "so much pain" in an "architecturally so intelligent and wonderful construction".

There were the coercive harnesses and isolation cells, the electric shocks and icy baths. Here, people spent decades and did not get well, like the schizophrenic woman who set fire shortly before her release: as if a part of her would rather not be free.

Former psychiatry in Limite's hometown Voghera in northern Italy is a majestic 19th-century building with a church and light courtyards. One of dozens of psychiatric hospitals in Italy that have expired for years. Novella Limite, author, director and literary teacher, is currently collecting money for a documentary about the asylum. It's meant to be a movie against oblivion, giving the former patient the dignity they were robbed of.

photo gallery

31 pictures

Novella Limite's favorite room in the old clinic is the dusty archive. A treasure trove with 17,000 medical records from 1876 - Destinies long forgotten.

There was the man whom all patients just called "Celentano" because he could sing as wonderful as world star Adriano Celentano. Once a year he made his big appearance at a party in the asylum. And there was Linda: Everyone loved her because Linda was still an adult woman like an innocent child. Or this supposedly highly-cultured patient who suddenly beat a patient with a shoe while fighting.

Escape from the sisters

Limite's work is also a work-up of one's own family history. An uncle of the second degree spent years in the clinic, and her grandmother was admitted as a child: "She was a very rebellious daughter, deviant behavior was then sufficient for internment."

When the 46-year-old runs through the deserted corridors of the clinic today, her family is always involved in her thoughts. The uncle often outsmarted the nurses and thus preserved his freedom. Instead of sleeping in his cell, he slept in the open air at night in a courtyard garden.

Everywhere Limite discovers traces of the past. Patients scratched the walls, which they missed most: flowers, trees, sun, moon - and naked women. Men and women were severely separated in the clinic for a long time. The worst cases were locked behind heavy iron doors in a semi-circular pavilion. "Many citizens who lived near the madhouse remember the screams from this wing," says Limite.

Sven Fennema

Former psychiatry in Veneto

Also Sven Fennema impressed this part of the institution especially. The photographer from Krefeld has already seen many dark, decaying walls - he has made a name for himself as a Lost Places photographer with opulent picture books. "From this corridor with the small, round cells, I immediately got goose bumps," he says. "Towards the back, through the iron shutters, it went into an isolated courtyard, from which one looked at high walls": End of freedom.

For his current book "Melancholia" (Frederking & Thaler) Fennema has visited some former psychiatric hospitals. The fact that there are so many in Italy is a stroke of luck for photographers - and thanks to the psychiatrist Franco Basaglia. Its radical reforms caused a worldwide sensation, as they led to the closure of all Italian institutions from 1978 onwards.

"Freedom heals"

Basaglia launched in 1973 with doctors and social workers the "Psichiatria Democratia" movement to fight unworthy conditions in clinics. Her buzzword: "Freedom heals". For a long time psychologically ill people in Italy were considered incurable. They were classified as "homicidal", treated as criminals, incapacitated, permanently locked away. Many clinics were hopelessly overcrowded.

As leader of several institutions, Basaglia, married to a left-wing politician, showed how else to do it: he opened closed compartments, abolished straitjackets and electric shocks, left the keys in the doors of the patient rooms. His concept of the "Therapeutic Community" initiated a general rethinking. Henceforth, the patient should be the focus of group therapies - and his delusion should no longer be restrained by brute force.

Basaglia made the San Giovanni Clinic in Trieste a pilot project of the World Health Organization. When he took over in 1971, 840 of 1,200 patients were forcibly interned. Basaglia dramatically reduced the size of the clinic and had many patients placed in their own apartments or living quarters. For basic services he founded "mental health centers". That was his vision for the whole of Italy.

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Sven Fennema, Petra Reski
Melancholia. Spells of forgotten worlds. Illustrated book on the most beautiful lost places in the south of Italy. Moving lyrics by Petra Reski. New photographic masterpiece by Sven Fennema (»Nostalgia«).

Publishing company:

Frederking & Thaler Verlag GmbH

Pages:

320

Price:

EUR 98,00

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With a shocking illustrated book on everyday life in the clinic and a signature campaign, he increased the political pressure. When a referendum on the dissolution of the psychiatric services was launched, Italy's government collapsed. In just three weeks she whipped the law 180, soon called "Basaglia law". From then on, patients were free to choose their doctor. They were no longer stigmatized as "homicidal" and "mentally ill", compulsions were only possible in exceptional cases. The construction of new clinics was banned, the old institutions should gradually close and general hospitals take over their duties.

Sven Fennema's impressive pictures show the consequences of this controversial reform. Nature quickly took control of the empty buildings, a drastic change of roles: roots and ivy today capture those walls that once held people captive. So in Volterra, at that time one of the worst clinics in the heart of Tuscany.

Mysterious Messages from NOF4

"The beauty of the environment and the terrible story make a very tough contrast," says Fennema. Orphaned wheelchairs, cell-like rooms, beds with coercive harnesses - and the drawing of a patient who called himself NOF4.

NOF4, a twisted abbreviation of his name Oreste Fernando Nannetti, had been first introduced as a ten-year-old. Later, after a brief career as an electrician, he again returned to a psychiatric ward for being a schizophrenic official for libel. In a clinic in Rome, he stood out because he talked day and night. When he was transferred to Tuscany in 1968, he stood out because he almost fell silent - and escaped into a fantasy parallel world.

With a belt buckle, NOF4 carved mysterious signs into the walls for years. Inch by inch until well over 100 square meters were covered. He chiselled his enigmatic "Book of Life" into the plaster side by side in his very own visual language. Hardly anyone understood him then. Today, his work is considered by some to be great art.

Of his "nuclear burglars," his inscriptions told of distant galaxies and telepathy messages. In his stories he rises to the "astral colonel" and "space civil engineer of the mental system," raves about heroic deeds of his royal family.

In fact, he had no family. NOF4 wrote supposed relatives letters, but nobody answered. When, in 1973, after 14 years, he was transferred to a more advanced clinic, his medical record read: "It is sad." We prefer not to write down what a mentally ill person has to say after so long a stay in a closed institution in which he was never visited by friends or relatives. "

Two lovers - in an empty clinic

For NOF4 Basaglia's reform was probably too late, too much his illness had already solidified. Half of the patients in Volterra died of lack of love and affection, he once complained.

And yet there are people who suddenly experienced love in such places. Mario and Luigina got to know each other at the clinic in Voghera, according to Novella Limite. They fell in love and married in the sanctuary.

Giacomo Doni

The Basaglia reform had also improved many things in Voghera - contacts in the city, art therapy, the end of the men-women separation. In this environment one could fall in love. And so it was a disaster for Mario and Luigina when the clinic closed in 1998: where should they go now?

So they stayed in the abandoned clinic, with special permission from the city, which handed them the keys. At the door of the common room they hung a heart-shaped shield with their names. They washed their laundry in the orphaned institution and watched television.

It sounds like a fairy tale: the lovers kept returning to this quiet place until they fell ill and died in a hospice a few years ago.