There was once a city of fools

The city of fools: the asylum. With all its weight of horror and cruelty, the director takes us to places of segregation and concealment where the ‘mentally ill’ are forgotten. It’s a film based on the work of Basaglia, the man who gave his name to the Law (No. 180), which closed the italian asylums in 1978. The film has now become a book of the same name, with a double DVD subtitled in several languages for the ‘Collana 180 – Archivio critico della salute mentale’ from the Edizioni Alphabeta Verlag publishing house.
In the film, you see: in Gorizia, the former psychiatric hospital in via Vittorio Veneto and Palazzo Lantieri – which hosted the Kings of France, Pius VI, Maria Theresa of Austria, Napoleon, Goethe, Schiller and Casanova. In Trieste: the waterfront, the Molo Audace – Pier and the former Provincial Psychiatric Hospital (Opp) of San Giovanni, an extraordinary urban-architectural complex made up of forty buildings of great historical and architectural interest set in an important botanical garden (currently being restored). Every summer it is home to outdoor events and film festivals.