Il trauma riemerso dei racconti del manicomio. Il caso di Villa Azzurra

Marina Guglielmi

First

2025-01-01

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Abstract

The Resurfaced Trauma in the Narratives of the Asylum. The Case of Villa Azzurra · The case of Italian asylums relates to the western history of total institutions and, at the same time, is unique in the world. The difference is given by Law 180 of 1978, known as ‘Basaglia Law’, which sanctioned the closure of psychiatric hospitals and legitimized the ‘psychiatric revolution’. This study fits into the panorama of Italian cultural studies and aims at analysing the way in which psychiatric history plays a pivotal role in the cultural and symbolic processes which have shaped the forms of memory and the modes of post-traumatic narration. The objective is to highlight the connection between the ‘sites of the trauma’ (Violi 2014) of internment in psychiatric hospital, the narratives of memory, and contemporary transmedia rewritings. The case study concerns Villa azzurra children’s mental hospital, which from the 1970s to today has been the subject of literary, journalistic, television, photographic and cinematographic narrations.