L’arte di legare le persone

“When I finished reading it, there was emotion. There was fear, amazement, annoyance, tenderness. There was compassion. When I finished reading it,I lived. How wonderful that L’arte di legare le persone has arrived. It isn’ta novel; it isn’t an essay; it is a story that contains us. It preserves human beings the way they have come into the world: there are those who heal, those who are healed, those who remain in the middle. Paolo Milone has composed an emotional mosaic that breathes the truth, from the first page to the last”.

Marco Missiroli

In these past months, how many times have we found ourselves talking about doctors: heroes, martyrs, victims… Actually, rhetoric aside, they are men and women who are exposed to suffering. Fragile, fallible, mortal. For forty years, Paolo Milone worked in an emergency psychiatric ward, and this is exactly what he recounts. No holds barred. Part Grey’s Anatomy and part Ronald Laing, sometimes even with laughter, the burstsand flashes of his portraits offer us a completely new gaze, rendering the dismay and the impotence, the curiosity, the passion, the exasperation, and the endless chain of questions that anyone who has chosen to “look into the abyss through the eyes of others” collects. There is nothing rhetorical in these pages. There is a proliferation of stories, and the power of life that stops before nothing. There are nurses, doctors, patients, passers-by, acquaintances, those who have fallen on one side and those who have fallen on the other ofthat “well-thrown toss of the dice” that separates the healthy from the sick. Readers will not put this book down without feeling a deep and lasting emotion, without looking at the mentally ill in a completely different way, and, above all, without immediately discussing it with someone.