Visiting Madness. The Psychiatric Hospital as a Tourist Destination

Abstract

In Italy, psychiatric hospitals are undergoing a new phase of recovery and planning. Their closure in the decades following Law 180 (1978) resulted in the abandonment and often the degradation of impressive architectural complexes. Many of them have been recovered and today it is possible to visit some institutes and, sometimes, the museum they contain: psychiatric hospitals are becoming tourist destinations. The objectives of this work are: to verify if asylums can be considered as possible locations for a particular European Dark Tourism; to test the idea of ​​preserving a material heritage – architectural structures and objects from the history of psychiatry – and an intangible heritage. The research path includes the recognition of the asylum population that has seen disadvantaged social classes subject to “invisible migration” towards asylums in the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. The case of the Laboratory of the Mind Museum of the former psychiatric hospital of S. Maria della Pietà in Rome is presented as an example of an innovative form of conservation that is both training in and knowledge of psychiatric history in Italy.