A walk out of the ordinary.

Deciding to stay in Rome during the Christmas holidays was a great opportunity for me, not only to see relatives and friends, but mainly to do some things that I had to postpone during a busy year.

One above all was returning to a very particular place where I have been last summer by chance: the “Santa Maria della Pietà” ex-psychiatric hospital, in the Montemario area.

Maybe some of you are wondering what brought me there the first time. Simple, in “Santa Maria della Pietà” lies the canine sanitary office where I brought my four legged friend to get his passport. So you can imagine my amazement when, while waiting for my turn, I discovered that I was in the largest and most important former asylum in Europe!

Discovering the “city of madmen and artists”.

For a long time, the “Santa Maria della Pietà” psychiatric hospital was called the “city of madmen”. A real city within a city, with 130 hectares and 41 pavilions immersed in a large park, built to “house” all the people considered “crazy”, who suffered from mental illness or psychological problems of various kinds, receiving “crazy” treatments, such as electroshock, straitjackets and lobotomy.

An immense place of human segregation, much more like a concentration camp than a treatment center, where men and women were deprived of everything, interned, humiliated, sedated and hidden from the eyes of the other society, the one that lived outside.

Deciding to return to this place was neither simple nor immediate. I first had to document myself and discover a reality that no one likes to remember.

Fortunately, the 1979 Basaglia law did put an end to these sad pages of suffering, even if the psychiatric hospital was definitively closed only in 1999.

My photographic report starts right from those torn pages of life, imagining what could have happened behind those windows, where excruciating screams and lamentations came from. Entering one of the pavilions was like experiencing that feeling of profound social abandonment mentioned in the various articles I read.

The use of Poetry to escape from Hell.

It is difficult to imagine the pain experienced in a mental hospital, because this subject has always been considered a huge taboo. But not for cinema, art and poetry.

I remember one of the most intense and dramatic cinematographic works on it: “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” by Forman (based on the homonymous novel by Ken Kesey published in 1962) which at the time caused quite a stir, denouncing the inhumane treatment of state psychiatric hospitals.

Describing that hell is impossible if you haven’t experienced it yourself.

Only the words of those who managed to survive this terrible experience can restore the sense of what makes no sense. Like the beautiful verses of the famous italian poetess Alda Merini, hospitalized three times in psychiatric hospitals.

Alda Marini experienced horrible tortures on her own body, but, despite this, when she came out of the asylum, she was able to transform this horror into poetry.

The pain of mental illness is something that screams inside you and can’t get out. The pain that surrounds you in the asylum is sometimes just a pretext for a greater condemnation, a slander of fate, or perhaps a punishment from God. I am convinced that a great passion for the afterlife can arise from pain. We would like to die, but at the same time we have the hope of living. (A. Merini).

There are many passages in her writings and interviews in which Merini talks about the loneliness and silence she felt in a mental hospital.

A serious and cumbersome silence, broken at times only by the piercing cries of those who were tied to their bed with bands around their wrists and ankles. (A. Merini)

A painful, ruthless, cruel and violent experience, converted into verses full of extraordinary spontaneity and intensity:

Madness is one of the most sacred things that exists on earth. It is a path of purifying pain, a suffering as the quintessence of logic. Madness must exist for its own sake, because madmen want it to exist. We call it madness, others call it disease. (A. Merini)

Madness is a spark of genius

Since 2015, part of the redevelopment project of the “Santa Maria della Pietà” complex has been entrusted to 28 artists who have transformed the facades of the abandoned pavilions, the walls and surrounding structures into large canvases that invite passers-by to reflect on the human condition and its many facets.

Among them, Federico Bibbo‘s work “2+2” struck me, with its sentence “Madness is a spark of genius”.

This sentence immediately made me think of Alda Merini when she talks about madness and genius in her interviews:

I was crazy among the crazy. The mad were mad at heart, some very intelligent. My best friendships were born there. The mad are nice, not like the demented who are all out in the world. I met the demented later, when I went out. (A. Merini)

Another artist who caught my attention was Gomez de Teran who covered all of pavilion 6, today the “Museum of the Mind”, with a gigantic work called “Things that cannot be seen” in which he represented a series of alienated figures who look into the void with terror and plug their ears while the “voices” in their heads continue to haunt them.

A work that gives rise to multiple personal interpretations, created to reflect on the theme of diversity and on the perception that society has of madness.

Another work that deserves to be admired is that of the famous artist Tina Loiodice with her “Thinking Child” who, with her disheveled hair, lively eyes and hand resting on her chin, seems to wonder about the future that awaits her.

Also questioning the condition of women is Violetta Carpino, a young Roman artist who with the work “Fetal Listening” focuses attention on the need to listen: her pregnant woman without a face has her arms wide open and carries an ear in her womb.

This weekend I want to do crazy things with you all.

That’s why I decided to take you to the former asylum of “Santa Maria della Pietà”.

A place that speaks not only of suffering and illness, but also of hope, creativity and rebirth.

If you are interested in finding out and going beyond the clichés, I invite you to visit my Instagram and Facebook channels where I will share all the shots taken during my walk. 

Be a little crazy today. It’s FRAday!

 

Photo FFG