Beyond the wall:an exhibition of Creative Expressions in Former Italian Psychiatric Institutions

an exhibition curated by

Elisa Boeri, Luca Cardani, Davide Del Curto

with Giorgio Bedoni

with the scientific contribution of

Marta Colombi, Renate Karjavcenko, Michela Pilotti

exhibition planned and promoted by

Politecnico di Milano – Mantova Campus

UNESCO Chair in Architectural Preservation and Planning in World Heritage Cities

In Mantua, within the evocative setting of the former Church of San Cristoforo, the exhibition “Beyond the Wall. The City Imagined from the former Italian asylums” curated by Elisa Boeri, Luca Cardani, Davide Del Curto with Giorgio Bedoni, Marta Colombi, Renate Karjavcenko and Michela Pilotti was held in the month of May 2025. Made possible through the collaboration between Mantovarchitettura and the Mantua Campus of the Politecnico di Milano with the Associazione degli Amici di PalazzoTe e dei Musei Mantovani. The illustrated essay in this issue of the Journal of Architectural Design and History seeks to retrace, through photographs and words, the narrative of an exhibition intended as a starting point for new research and deeper insights into the role of architecture—whether real or imagined—within total institutions.

The exhibition focused on the timely and pressing theme of spaces of care, particularly those dedicated to psychiatric treatment. Such spaces have long reflected broader cultural attitudes toward mental health, institutional authority, and society’s complex relationship with the "other." Between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the emergence of grand and monumental asylum buildings was observed, constructed according to principles of containment and order. These were spaces conceived not merely as places of healing, but as instruments of control—designed to separate, isolate, and even “correct” individuals deemed mentally ill, and therefore “different.”

In Italian archives that—often with difficulty and great care—preserve memories in the form of correspondence, medical records, and black-and-white photographs, one frequently encounters flashes of acute visions of the “outside”: utopian or strikingly concrete cities, landscapes, alien worlds, or starkly contemporary realities imagined by patients as possible forms of escape.

The San Lazzaro Psychiatric Hospital in Reggio Emilia, San Niccolò in Siena, the Volterra Psychiatric Hospital, and San Giovanni in Trieste are the main asylum institutions where the works on display were conceived: drawings, sculptures, and graffiti that represent a profound act of resistance—an assertion of identity in the face of the dehumanization inherent in spaces of psychiatric confinement.

Although the perimeter wall of the Lombroso section—the pavilion reserved for patients considered the most dangerous—was demolished several years ago, a number of photographs preserved in the Carlo Livi Library in Reggio Emilia partially reconstruct the image of this space. Isolated from the other pavilions of the psychiatric complex and itself enclosed by an inaccessible boundary wall, the Lombroso Pavilion was a site of profound segregation.

The photographic record reveals how the wall had become a surface upon which patients projected an imagined world composed of houses, buildings, and urban vistas—often anonymous—that reflect a deep, intimate longing for a lost sense of normality within the dynamics of the total institution. These images depict ordinary landscapes, suburban settings reminiscent of many Italian peripheries, envisioned as a hoped-for visual horizon. Among these views, a Renaissance-style perspectival scene adds a poetic dimension to the narrative.

The authors of these mural drawings remain unknown. However, we do know the name of one patient, Vincenzo G., to whom many of these cityscapes can be attributed. His visions—echoing the urban landscapes of Italy’s economic boom in the 1960s—were rendered on the outer wall of the most tightly confined ward of San Lazzaro using herbs, pigments, and brushes.

Admitted to San Lazzaro in 1916, Giuseppe Righi (1876–1944) dedicated himself, between 1930 and 1940, to producing small- and medium-format drawings in black ink. In his visionary and imagined cities, Righi almost systematically excludes the presence of the human figure. Landscapes and vistas unfold in a rhythm of dreamlike tranquility, concealing miniature details and decorative elements. Decoration, in turn, is expressed through friezes and initials, which Righi patiently added to the correspondence he sent to his family.

Born in Gonzaga (Mantua), Corrado Angiolini (1877-1943)  was first admitted to the Roncati Psychiatric Hospital in Bologna on May 3, 1909. A few months later, he was transferred to the San Lazzaro Asylum in Reggio Emilia, where he was permanently institutionalized in 1914 with a diagnosis of “manic-depressive psychosis.”

Angiolini never participated in the artistic activities of the San Lazzaro Atelier; instead, he worked in solitude on a single, large-scale project: a system of tracks for wheeled carts designed for the distribution of meals and linens within the pavilion-based asylum complex.

Mauro Mazzinghi (1956-) was admitted to the Morel 2, and later the Morel 1, pavilions of the Volterra Psychiatric Hospital, where he began an initial body of work focused on machines, turbines, bulldozers, and tracked vehicles. His experimentation eventually shifted toward the theme of skyscrapers, which became his artistic obsession.

His drawings were produced on improvised materials—scrolls, sheets of paper, old posters—and created using basic tools such as rulers, protractors, pencils, pens, or markers.

Mazzinghi’s series of axonometric skyscraper drawings is characterized by repetition and an upward thrust, evoking a condition of liberation, as suggested by the title of his recent solo exhibition: “Up… Up… to the Sky!”

In 1956, following an arrest for contempt of a public official, Fernando Oreste Nannetti was institutionalized at the Santa Maria della Pietà Psychiatric Hospital in Rome.
In 1958, he was transferred to the Volterra Psychiatric Hospital in Tuscany, where he would remain until his death in 1994. During more than thirty years of confinement, no one ever visited him, and the asylum effectively became his home.

At Volterra, Nannetti began a patient and utopian act of engraving the perimeter wall of the inner courtyard of the judicial ward in the Ferri Pavilion—a two-story building with a C-shaped floor plan enclosing a rear garden. By scratching the wall with the buckle of his vest—a part of the so-called “madman’s uniform”—Nannetti inscribed an open-air book narrating the cosmogony of his imagined world: a 180-meter-long and approximately 2-meter-high graffito now regarded as one of the most significant examples of Art Brut.

Exposed to the elements for many years, the few surviving fragments—now detached—are preserved at the Volterra Asylum Museum. To fully grasp the scale and complexity of the work, one must rely on the remarkable photographs taken in 1980 by Pier Nello Manoni, a tribute to the memory of the artist Nannetti and to those "fantastical places of the mind, to madness, as a human response to marginalization, loneliness, and illness.”

In 1973, within Laboratorio P—housed in an empty ward of the San Giovanni psychiatric hospital in Trieste—staff, patients, and artists worked intensively for two months to create a large papier-mâché sculpture of a blue horse. Inside its belly were placed letters and personal writings, poems filled with hope, imagination, and fantasy.

Alongside the psychiatric patients, sculptor Vittorio Basaglia and theater director Giuliano Scabia coordinated an artistic action that would soon become the symbol of the asylum deinstitutionalization movement led by Franco Basaglia.

On February 25, 1973, Marco Cavallo crossed the boundary walls of the asylum for the first time. Accompanied by a jubilant crowd of patients, doctors, artists, students, and citizens, the sculpture triumphantly entered the center of Trieste—symbolically tearing down the wall that had long separated the asylum from the city, and moving beyond the wall of indifference that for centuries had divided life on the outside from the world "inside" the psychiatric institution.

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