14

Looking at Women and Mental Illness in

Fascist Italy: An Exhibition’s Dialogical and
Feminist Approach
Lucia Re

The exhibition I fiori del male: donne in manicomio nel regime fascista (Flowers of Evil:
Women in Mental Hospitals under Fascism), curated by Annacarla Valeriano and
Costantino Di Sante, traveled between 2016 and 2020 to several cities across Italy and
was hosted by a variety of institutions, including museums, theaters, schools, and other
cultural spaces.1 Based on substantial archival research, the exhibition was widely
reviewed and well received. In most of its iterations, it was used as the basis for
various forms of public interaction, including debates, roundtables, readings, teach-
ins, workshops, and performances. Through a selection of historic photographs and
excerpts from medical records, letters, diaries, and clinical studies, drawn mostly from
the archives of the Sant’Antonio Abate psychiatric hospital in Teramo, as well as posters
and other visual media from the fascist era pertaining to women’s roles, the exhibition
provided a powerful, concise, moving, and thought-provoking account of several
key aspects of the Fascist regime in Italy. These included questions of gender norms,
the fascist appropriation of Lombrosian thought, ideas of racial degeneration, and
the regime’s policies for the “defense of race,” including the demographic campaign,
eugenics, and the new securitarian paradigm. It also revealed the extent to which
the regime not only made the internment of women considered “abnormal,” “against
nature,” or outside the norm key to the safety of the nation, but also presented this
policy, as well as an increase in the number of asylums and inmates, as exemplary
of the fascist modernization of the state.2 The exhibition paid attention to the fascist
control of sexuality and eroticism; the criminalization of abortion and birth control;
and the reinvention of hysteria as a psychiatric category used to legitimate women’s
confinement and punishment. The catalog reproduced many of the exhibition’s images
and texts and included essays by historians, archivists, and psychiatrists, most with
firsthand and in-depth knowledge of the institution and its archives (Figure 14.1).3
A map by the entrance displayed the location of every asylum in Italy under
the regime. The Teramo asylum emerged in this exhibition as a microcosm—one

9781350229457_txt_rev.indd 186 10-06-2022 16:34:13

 Women and Mental Illness in Fascist Italy 187

Figure 14.1 Catalog cover of I fiori del male: donne in manicomio nel regime fascista. Mostra
fotodocumentaria, ed. Annacarla Valeriano and Costantino di Sante, exh. cat. (Acquaviva
Picena: Tipografia Fast Edit, 2016).

representative of the fascist approach to mental health and “deviancy,” as well as the
process of disciplining and punishing at the heart of fascist ideology.4 It revealed
the extent to which the regime, in order to function as such, was based on and relied
on the control and regulation of women’s bodies, sexuality, and gender roles.5
I fiori del male was designed as a traveling exhibition that could be adapted to
different sites, venues, and locations. Through simple, lightweight, and moveable wood
and canvas panels; eye-catching graphics, colors, and captions; and a juxtaposition
of photographic details and/or enlargements, it succeeded in its documentary and
historical intent without being overly didactic, polemical, exploitative, voyeuristic,
or sensationalist (Figure 14.2). The exhibition was divided into six sections: the first

9781350229457_txt_rev.indd 187 10-06-2022 16:34:17

 188 Curating Fascism

Figure 14.2 Some of the exhibition panels in Fano, I fiori del male. Photo courtesy
Annacarla Valeriano.

four provided the historical, cultural, social, and cultural frameworks for the women
and girls whose representative stories were vividly illustrated in the remaining two
sections.6 Rather than rely on the shock value of the images or the spectacularization
of mental illness—as was sometimes the case in previous photographic exhibitions
on asylums in Italy—I fiori del male used the historical images and other documents
to weave together threads of a compelling, complex, and open narrative in which the
inmates’ individual stories emerge as parts of a larger tapestry drawn by the curators
to reconstruct the historical and ideological context of their lives as women under
the regime.7 Although the sections of the exhibition were numbered from 1 to 6, the
viewer could start at any point: for example, they could start at section 6, which was
devoted to the inmates’ life stories, and then return to previous sections dedicated to
cultural norms enforced by the regime.
The term “dialogical” in my title refers both to my method in this essay and to what
I understand to be the exhibition’s approach. Over the past two years I have conducted
research through a dialogue in the form of back-and-forth email conversations with
Valeriano, who kindly answered my questions and discussed issues that I raised. The
available material pertaining to the exhibition indicates that the curators were able to
illuminate an aspect of fascism that remained unscrutinized—and of which there was
little or no public awareness—while dialogically reversing the logic of the Foucaldian
panopticon adopted by fascism in its attempt to control and discipline the women and
girls it deemed criminally insane because they operated outside the norm.8 According

9781350229457_txt_rev.indd 188 10-06-2022 16:34:20

 190 Curating Fascism

powerful images and texts, the curators were able to reach a wide, multigenerational,
and diverse audience across Italy.15 Publicized online by the University of Teramo and
by social media and online publications across Italy, I fiori del male brought to light
photographs, long buried in the archives, that were originally taken as a means of
control and exclusion. It encouraged open dialogue and discussions about a subject
previously considered shameful and taboo, reversing the dehumanizing logic of the
fascist institution by placing letters and patients’ words in dialogue with photographs
and portraits of other patients. It thus fostered a positive, albeit imaginary, exchange
between the exhibition’s visitors and the patients and their suffering. In its iterations,
the exhibition solicited responses and opened communication with different audiences.
One woman described her reaction to the exhibition in Rome as follows:

The first impression I had while visiting the exhibition … was chills running down
my spine. I had the feeling that, behind those eyes that looked at me from the
photographs next to their medical record, instead of those little girls, adolescent
girls, and women, there could be me; I could have been each one of them. Each one
of us could have been one of them.16

Another wrote that she found the exhibition “very beautiful and devastating”
(Figure 14.3).17 The first woman was struck by a descriptive medical typology from
the asylum’s records that, she felt, could easily apply to “one of our friends” or even to

Figure 14.3 Exhibition view, I fiori del male, Ascoli. Photo courtesy Annacarla Valeriano.

9781350229457_txt_rev.indd 190 10-06-2022 16:34:23

 Women and Mental Illness in Fascist Italy 191

ourselves: “Loquacious, impertinent, flirtatious. Extravagant, red in the face, attractive.

Impulsive, irreverent, with a naughty smirk on her face.”18 It made her feel how
uncomfortably thin the border between what is considered “normal” and “deviant”
could be, and how easily an individual could be flattened into a “type.” According
to Valeriano, in the discussions and workshops with many groups, including large
numbers of middle school and high school students across Italy, the Lombrosian
categories embraced and recycled by fascism—and the “scientific” arguments about
sexual difference and sexual deviancy, women’s inferiority, and women’s reproductive
and domestic destiny—were the topics that generated the most interest and
commentary, especially in light of the endurance of gender bias, prejudice, inequality,
and violence against women and LGBTQ+ individuals in today’s Italy.19 Press reviews
of the show were unanimously positive, with the exception of a review published in the
then neofascist newspaper Il Giornale d’Italia.20
For Lombroso and his school, photography was not merely a technology that could
be used to support Lombrosian theories of the physiognomy of the insane: it became
a critical part of those theories and typologies. Photographs could be used as eloquent
portraits of the insane according to typologies and thus reduce individuality to a type.
Photography could record the appearance of the mentally ill for study and therapy,
and it could facilitate identification and the sharing of records with police. In the early
twentieth century a photograph was often attached to the patient’s record, but the
use of photography became more prevalent in asylums in the fascist era. Although
photography has from its inception been associated with the history of surveillance and
punishment—and is arguably a structural component of the Foucaldian panopticon in
the asylum—I fiori del male was able to reverse this logic dialogically.21 Along with the
identification, typology, and diagnostic mugshots used for surveillance, documentation,
and control, the curators found, among the images from the fascist era, celebratory
group portraits sometimes taken by doctors and nurses who embraced the art of
photography. These group portraits were meant as evidence of the effectiveness, order,
and functioning of the institution under the regime. The inmates’ dehumanization
is evident in many of these images, as are the emotions of anger and fear. Some of
the patients apparently sometimes enjoyed being photographed, however, and took
advantage of those rare moments to occasionally smile. The exhibition’s curators took
advantage of the complex, layered, and contradictory richness of the photographic
material to reframe the story told by the images, to contextualize it and highlight
the humanity of the subjects as individuals. While doctors may have photographed
patients in attempts to create typologies of mental illness, the captured portraits in the
archive displayed in I fiori del male did the opposite: they resurrected individuals in all
their particularity.22 In contrast to the totalitarian, one-way narrative intended by the
regime, I fiori del male refrained from dictating any single path, order, or amount of
time in which the images had to be looked at and absorbed by the viewer. Together, as
arranged by the curators in dialogue with handwritten fragments of texts authored by
both patients and doctors, these photographs constituted a complex, aesthetically and
historically layered body of work.
To highlight the humanity and individuality of the inmates, the curators chose
to exhibit several group photos and close-up enlargements of the inmates’ faces and

9781350229457_txt_rev.indd 191 10-06-2022 16:34:23

 192 Curating Fascism

Figure 14.4 Page from: I fiori del male: donne in manicomio nel regime fascista. Mostra
fotodocumentaria, ed. Annacarla Valeriano and Costantino di Sante, exh. cat. (Acquaviva
Picena: Tipografia Fast Edit, 2016), 50.

eyes from the same group photos, and the result is startling: the viewer finds herself
sometimes looking into the eyes of a patient, as if literally face to face with her
(Figure 14.4).
Behind a young woman’s smiling face and the wall of wire that frames her head, one
close-up reveals the desperate, intense dark eyes of another, older inmate (Figure 14.5).
The curators’ tactful, moving use of photographs and documentary material, along
with the exhibition’s open organization, succeeded in generating an experience for
the viewer that is equally aesthetic, emotional, cognitive, and critical, exemplifying
a feminist and Levinasian curatorial approach. In the introduction to the catalog, the
curators write: “It seemed important to us to tell the stories of these women starting
from their faces, their expressions, their gazes—gazes in which the erasures and failures
of memory that relegated them into silence and oblivion seem to be almost annulled.”23
Thus the exhibition inverts the logic of the panopticon and breaks open the walls of the
institution and its archive, bringing us face to face with the inmates and their stories
and identities. We look into their eyes by looking at their photographic portraits and
reading their words and stories. This process assumes Levinasian connotations because
it is a process that dialogically counters the logic of isolation, othering, and exclusion.24
From the viewpoint of the practice of curating, and as a traveling exhibition whose
purpose was not art historical but rather pedagogical (in the best sense of this term),
I fiori del male exemplifies a feminist, relational approach. This approach is even
more significant when dealing with the question of how to meaningfully address and
present to a contemporary audience the problematic history of Italian fascism and

9781350229457_txt_rev.indd 192 10-06-2022 16:34:25

 Women and Mental Illness in Fascist Italy 193

Figure 14.5 Page from: I fiori del male: donne in manicomio nel regime fascista. Mostra
fotodocumentaria, ed. Annacarla Valeriano and Costantino di Sante, exh. cat. (Acquaviva
Picena: Tipografia Fast Edit, 2016), 12.

its cultural and social practices. In curating the exhibition, Valeriano and Di Sante
in fact performed and produced an effective feminist reading and dramatization of
the fascist asylum’s archive. Sybil Fisher notes that the word “curate” comes from the
Latin word cura, and as a feminist Fisher wants to reinscribe an ethical concept of
care in the fabric of curatorial practice: she raises the “the question of a specifically
curatorial sense of care and responsibility for the ‘other’ in a relational, ethical sense,”
pointing out that “the ethical interweaves in several ways with the political and the
aesthetic.”25 Although she addresses specifically the curatorial practice of temporary
art exhibitions, I believe her approach may be extended to historical and pedagogical
exhibitions such as I fiori del male that also include an aesthetic, emotional, and
dramatic dimension. At play in this exhibition is, more specifically, what Susan
Best, inspired by the research of Ulrich Bauer, calls the “reparative aesthetics” of
secondary witnessing.26 Best demonstrates that in works by contemporary artists

9781350229457_txt_rev.indd 193 10-06-2022 16:34:29

 194 Curating Fascism

such as the Australian Anne Ferran—who uses archival photographs hidden from
public scrutiny to document forgotten Australian women’s histories of incarceration
and forced labor—contemporary viewers are moved and positioned as secondary
witnesses, as well as seekers of historical understanding.27 Although not trying to be
artists, the curators of I fiori del male similarly drew on the asylum’s archives to create
an exhibition that was not merely documentary; its caring, carefully drawn, and
contextualized narrative montage of images and texts, with its simple use of space,
color, and graphics, was designed to draw the spectators in as they walked through
the exhibition and invite them to see and empathize with the inmates’ humanity and
suffering, thus becoming both secondary witnesses and critics of the Fascist regime
that placed the women there and took their photographs.
Unlike the important photographic work done in asylums in Italy under the
auspices of Franco and Franca Basaglia by artists such as Carla Cerati and Gianni
Berengo Gardin, which contributed to the movement that led to the Basaglia Law and
the closing of asylums, the original photographs used in I fiori del male were taken
by photographers who worked for the asylum itself. These images therefore lack the
immediate, striking shock and horror of Cerati and Berengo Gardin’s work, which
was first shown, in part, in the 1968 exhibition in Parma and Florence La violenza
istituzionalizzata (Institutionalized Violence) and published in Morire di Classe (To
Die Because of Your Class, 1969), which documented the unspeakable suffering of
the inmates’ lives.28 The photographers themselves acknowledged how powerless the
camera was to capture the horror of the inmates’ condition. And as John Foot has
argued, that book may perhaps be faulted—paradoxically—for treating the patients
portrayed therein as mere objects, mostly as evidence for the Basaglias’ argument
against asylums articulated in the introduction.29 Ironically, the images in I fiori del
male emerge as less limited and objectifying. While taking care not to identify the
photographed patients by name in the panel labels, the curators juxtaposed group
and individual photographic portraits of women and girls with excerpts from letters
and diaries, in addition to case histories and medical notes from the archive, to bring
to life the reality of their plight.30 The spectator is therefore able to fill in, imagine,
and grasp the humanity of the inmates—to feel how behind each portrait, pair of
eyes, and smile there is a real person who deserved to be cared for yet fell victim to
the dehumanizing logic of the Italian totalitarian regime. Furthermore, the exhibition
was structured and organized in such a way that the spectator was not just faced
with a series of numbing images or stories of suffering. Instead, the overarching
logic used by the regime to justify and rationalize the internment and isolation of
each representative—and yet very real—woman and girl was clarified and exposed
by the exhibition in simple but never reductive terms so that the visitor was able to
understand and to critique it.
Balancing historical documentation with the production of an aesthetic experience,
powerful emotional identification, and deep critical reflection, I fiori del male exemplifies
a curatorial approach informed by a feminist ethics of care. It shows how exhibition
curators can contribute to a better, wider, and more discerning understanding of the
complex, troubling, and enduring legacy of fascism.

9781350229457_txt_rev.indd 194 10-06-2022 16:34:29

 Women and Mental Illness in Fascist Italy 195

Notes
1 Social historian Annacarla Valeriano works in the University of Teramo’s Archivio
della Memoria Abruzzese, and she has published two award-winning books on the
Sant’Antonio Abate Asylum featured in this exhibition: Ammalò di testa: Storie del
manicomio di Teramo (1880–1931) (Rome: Donzelli, 2014) and Malacarne: Donne
e manicomio nell’Italia fascista (Rome: Donzelli, 2017). The latter constitutes the
exhibition’s scholarly foundation. Historian Costantino Di Sante specializes in
the history of internment and deportation in modern Italy. An expert in photo-
documentary sources, he has curated photo-documentary exhibitions including I
campi di concentramento in Italia: Dall’internamento alla deportazione 1940–1945,
exh. cat. (Rome: Franco Angeli, 2002). I fiori del male traveled to the following
sites: 2016: Teramo, Biblioteca Melchiorre Delfico; Rome, Casa della Memoria e
della Storia. 2017: Bolzano, Liceo Giosué Carducci; Chieti, Liceo Classico G. B.
Vico; Ascoli Piceno, Palazzo dei Capitani; Pescara, Circolo Aternino; Fano, Foyer
del Teatro della Fortuna; L’Aquila, Ex Ospedale Psichiatrico di Collemaggio. 2018:
Rimini, Palazzo del Podestà; Pineto (Teramo), Villa Filiani; Lanciano, Polo museale;
Turin, Biblioteca civica Villa Amoretti; Florence, Università degli Studi; Termoli,
Arcivescovado. 2018: Rovereto, Urban Center. 2019: Bologna, Complesso del
Baraccano; Brindisi, Palazzo Nervegna. 2020: Merano, Museo delle Donne/Frauen
Museum.
2 Valeriano, Malacarne, 54–7. The number of women interned in asylums increased
exponentially under fascism: A new asylum opened in Reggio Calabria in 1932,
which was presented by the regime as a great modern achievement. By 1941 ninety-
five thousand individuals were interned, mostly women.
3 I fiori del male: donne in manicomio nel regime fascista. Mostra fotodocumentaria, ed.
Annacarla Valeriano and Costantino di Sante, exh. cat. (Acquaviva Picena: Tipografia
Fast Edit, 2016). All images are reproduced from the catalog unless otherwise
indicated.
4 Dating back to the fourteenth century, Teramo’s Sant’Antonio Abate was by the
late nineteenth century among the largest asylums in south-central Italy, known as
Manicomio Sant’Abate and, from 1931, under the regime, as Ospedale psichiatrico
provinciale Sant’Antonio Abate. The asylum’s first director, who expanded and
reorganized it in the fascist era, was Marco Levi Bianchini, then considered a
leader in psychiatry. The complex, almost a “city within the city” is no longer in
use, although a project for its use by the University of Teramo, including museum
and exhibition spaces, is being planned. For a history of the process that led to the
asylum’s closure in 1998, see https://www.manicomio.unite.it/ and https://www.
ospedalepsichiatrico.it/ (both accessed April 27, 2022).
5 See Lucia Re, “Fascist Theories of ‘Woman’ and the Construction of Gender,” in
Mothers of Invention: Women, Italian Fascism, and Culture, ed. Robin Pickering-
Iazzi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 76–99. For a broader
historical account of women under fascism, see Victoria De Grazia, How Fascism
Ruled Women: Italy, 1922–1944 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992).
6 Women who did not conform to the role of exemplary wife and mother were
considered “anomalous” and labeled “Insane and moral imbeciles.” The exhibition
documented that these included women considered inadequate mothers; rebellious
and disobedient adolescents; “hysterics”; women who had abortions; lesbians;

9781350229457_txt_rev.indd 195 10-06-2022 16:34:29

 196 Curating Fascism

women who had sexual relations outside marriage; “erotic” women; women who left
their husbands; women who wandered the streets and spent nights outside the home;
women who refused their domestic duties or were lazy; women who disobeyed their
father or husband; women who refused to marry; and women who were victims
of rape. The Asylum abolished the rights of individuals for the sake of “public
order” and difesa della razza (defense of race). Eugenics was central to its ideology.
Lombrosian thought and categories included, for example, both the idea that the
female brain is childlike and the “natural” biological and intellectual inferiority of
woman. Experimental therapies included electroshock, inoculation of malaria, and
high doses of insulin to induce coma. See Valeriano, Malacarne, 83–109. On eugenics
in Fascist Italy, see Francesco Cassata, Molti, sani e forti: L’eugenetica in Italia (Turin:
Bollati Boringhieri, 2006).
7 Most images and documents are from the archive of the Teramo asylum held by
the Dipartimento di salute mentale Asl and Teramo’s Archivio di Stato. On the
relationship between psychiatry and photographic exhibitions in modern Italy,
and on the genre of “asylum photography,” see Maddalena Carli, “Testimonianze
oculari: L’immagine fotografica e l’abolizione dell’istituzione manicomiale in Italia,”
in “Spazi manicomiali del Novecento,” ed. M. Carli e V. Fiorino, Memoria e ricerca 47
(September–December 2014): 99–113. For a wider, comparative account of questions
pertaining to exhibitions of asylum photography, see Catharine Coleborne and Dolly
MacKinnon, eds., Exhibiting Madness in Museums: Remembering Psychiatry through
Collection and Display (London: Routledge, 2011).
8 An important point of reference in Valeriano’s books is Michel Foucault, Discipline
and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage,
1995). On the structure and function of the panopticon, see “Panopticism,” in ibid.,
195–228.
9 Valeriano, Malacarne, 103.
10 Ibid., 51.
11 Ibid., 103.
12 Mario Tobino, Le libere donne di Magliano (Milan: Mondadori, 1963), 14. Translation
by the author.
13 Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s
Italy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997).
14 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 203: “The Panopticon was also a laboratory; it could
be used as a machine to carry out experiments, to alter behaviour, to train or correct
individuals.”
15 In Merano, in the Alto Adige region, the exhibition at the Women’s Museum was
accompanied by a bilingual program of lectures, discussions, and documentary
films in Italian and German. One lecture by Costantino Di Sante addressed the
theme of the deportation of mentally ill patients from asylums in Italy to German
concentration camps.
16 Valeria Castrucci, “Una mostra che ci riguarda tutte,” ZapRuder: Storie in movimento
42 (2017): 148.
17 Anita Picconi, “I fiori del male: donne chiuse in manicomio e dimenticate, Roma le
ricorda,” 180 gradi, November 8, 2016, https://180gradi.org/cultura/anita-picconi/i-
fiori-del-male-donne-chiuse-in-manicomio-e-dimenticate-roma-le-ricorda (accessed
April 27, 2022).
18 Castrucci, “Una mostra,” 148.

9781350229457_txt_rev.indd 196 10-06-2022 16:34:29

 Women and Mental Illness in Fascist Italy 197

19 Italy ranks sixty-third in the 2021 Global Gender Gap Report; see https://www.
ingenere.it/ricerche/global-gender-gap-report-2021 (accessed April 27, 2022). Italy
has some of the fewest women in the workforce of any developed economy, and less
than half of working-age Italian women are employed according to the Organisation
for Economic Co-operation and Development. The burden of domestic work,
childcare, and care of the elderly is still disproportionately on women. Between 2007
and 2017, the percentage of women among Italy’s total murder victims has risen from
24 to 34 percent.
20 According to Valeriano (email message to the author, September 14, 2021), the
reviewer objected to the exhibition’s “one-way view of history.” I was unable to
track down this review, however: the newspaper, with Franco Storace as editor,
ceased publications in 2018, although a new incarnation (with a different political
orientation and editor) appeared in 2020. Storace is an example of the enduring
legacy of fascism in Italy. Once a member of the neofascist Alleanza Nazionale party
and now close to the right-wing parties Lega and Fratelli d’Italia, he was the president
of the Lazio region. He is still active in journalism as assistant editor of Il Tempo and
aimed, at the time of this writing, to become the new mayor of Rome.
21 Among the first exhibitions to look critically at the relationship of photography with
mental illness was Nascita della fotografia psichiatrica, part of the Venice Biennale at
Ca’ Corner della Regina, exh. cat. (Venice: Marsilio, 1981).
22 According to some, what was recorded by the camera may indeed have the power to
restore to today’s viewer the humanity of the mentally ill in ways that a written text
rarely can. See Barbara Brookes, “Pictures of People, Pictures of Places. Photography
and the Asylum,” in Exhibiting Madness in Museums: Remembering Psychiatry
through Collection and Display, ed. Catharine Coleborne and Dolly MacKinnon
(London: Routledge: 2011) 30–47.
23 Valeriano and Di Sante, I fiori del male, 5.
24 Per David-Antoine Williams, “Tête-à-tête, face-à-face: Brodsky, Lévinas, and the
Ethics of Poetry” Poetics Today 30, no. 2 (2009): 207–35, the Levinasian face is
not necessarily one of the empirically available, or real human faces of everyday
experience, though it embodies their most important aspects: expressiveness and
uniqueness.
25 Sybil Fisher, “Curare: To care, to curate. A relational ethic of care in curatorial
practice” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Leeds, 2013, 5, https://etheses.whiterose.
ac.uk/6867/ [accessed April 27, 2022]); and “Major Global Recurring Art Shows
‘Doing Feminist Work’: A Case Study of the 18th Biennale of Sydney: All Our
Relations (2012)” in Curating Differently: Feminisms, Exhibitions and Curatorial
Spaces, ed. Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishers,
2016), 129–40.
26 Susan Best, Reparative Aesthetics: Witnessing in Contemporary Art Photography
(London: Bloomsbury, 2016).
27 Hal Foster identified an upsurge of art focusing on archives and historical and
ethnographic photography in pursuit of a kind of “counter-memory” and seeking to
retrieve and document neglected or marginalized experiences. See Hal Foster, “An
Archival Impulse,” October 110 (2004): 3–22.
28 Photographers who took photographs of patients in mental institutions in Italy
from the 1950s onward and exhibited them in shows devoted to the subject of
mental illness and asylums include Mario Giacomelli, Luciano D’Alessandro, Carla
Cerati, Gianni Berengo Gardin, Reymond Depardon, Gian Butturini, Paola Mattioli,

9781350229457_txt_rev.indd 197 10-06-2022 16:34:29

 198 Curating Fascism

Uliano Lucas, Paolo Pini, Paolo Lucignani, and Ferdinando Scianna. Exhibitions
after the historic La violenza istituzionalizzata include Inventario di una psichiatria,
Rome, Palazzo Braschi, May–July 1981 (catalog Inventario di una psichiatria,
Milan: Electa, 1981) with photography from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s; Trieste
dei manicomi, Trieste, 1998 (catalog Trieste dei manicomi: Antologia precaria di un
cambiamento epocale – Diciannove fotografi raccontano, ed. Giuseppe Dell’Acqua e
Annamaria Castellan, Trieste: Cultura Viva Editrice, 1998); Il volto della follia, Reggio
Emilia and Correggio, November 2005–February 2006 (catalog Il volto della follia:
Cent’anni di immagini del dolore, ed. Sandro Parmiggiani, Milan: Skira, 2005). This
exhibition included historic mug shots and other photographs of patients taken in
the nineteenth century by Emilio Poli in Reggio Emilia’s Manicomio di San Lazzaro.
A documentary, trilingual exhibition curated in 2014 by the German Association
of Psychiatry, the Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, and
Berlin’s Foundation Topography of Terror, Berlin, entitled Registered, Persecuted,
Annihilated: The Sick and the Disabled under National Socialism, with a small
section devoted to Italy curated by the Società Italiana di Psichiatria called “Patients,
Asylums and Psychiatrists in Italy during Fascism and World War II,” was in Rome
at the Vittoriano (Monument to Victor Emmanuel II) in 2017. This wide-ranging
exhibition traveled to various Italian cities and sites in 2018 and 2019, tracing the
history of psychiatry and mental institutions and their practices (including forced
sterilization) under Nazism. Although not focused on patients and inmates of a
specific institution, it did include photographs and life stories of individual victims
in several German psychiatric hospitals and camps. Unlike I fiori del male, the full
names of the patients and victims of Nazi persecution were not withheld, and their
identities were documented along with those of the doctors. The small Italian section,
however, had no images and no documentation pertaining to specific institutions
and inmates and was devoted to the documentation of Italian psychiatrists’ nearly
unanimous support of fascist and racist policies (although a handful of doctors did
join the Resistance), and their collusion with the deportation of Jews from Italian
institutions in northeastern Italy (Trieste, Venice, and Treviso) to Nazi concentration
camps.
29 John Foot, “Photography and Radical Psychiatry in Italy in the 1960s: The Case
of the Photobook ‘Morire di Classe’ (1969),” History of Psychiatry 26, no. 1 (2015):
19–35; and David Forgacs, “Asylums” in Italy’s Margins: Social Exclusion and Nation
Formation since 1861 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) 197–262.
30 Although not bound to do so by Italian law, which allows archival documents to be
published after seventy years have elapsed, the curators chose for ethical reasons
not to identify the patients by last name so as not to expose them or their families,
for the texts often contain sensitive personal information regarding individuals’
mental health, sexual life, and family histories. On the ethics of using sensitive
visual documents and photographic images of psychiatric patients in exhibitions,
see Elizabeth Gagen, “Facing Madness: The Ethics of Exhibiting Sensitive Historical
Photographs,” Journal of Historical Geography 71 (2021): 39–50.

9781350229457_txt_rev.indd 198 10-06-2022 16:34:29