Le libere donne di Magliano

Naked, a mattress on the floor. She doesn’t even feel the solitude in which she finds herself. She is in the insane asylum on top of the hill of Santa Maria delle Grazie. The closest town is Magliano, a few kilometres from Lucca.For the local population, the expression “coming from Magliano” means bearing the signs of madness, of a life swept by the sublime and damned winds of mental distress. In the women’s psychiatric ward, in the years prior to the age of psychiatric drugs and the Basaglia reform, a doctor is living with women who are aggressive, sad, erotically- charged, desperate, horrible, meek, sick, or who simply escaped from the world. This novel, a masterpiece by Mario Tobino, is a poem of the very deep and unique atmosphere that pervades the rooms of madness: “the insane asylum is full of flowers, but you can’t see them.”