Curriculum vitæ
In 2020 he received his Master’s Degree in Storia e Civiltà presented at the University of Pisa with a grade of 110/110 Lode presenting a thesis in Cultural history entitled “Da ministro e da papà. Parole, emozioni e immagini della narrazione neo-nazionalista di Matteo Salvini” (thesis supervisor: Alberto Mario Banti) in which he analyzed Salivini’s nationalist political narrative through cultural history schemes. In 2020 he curated, in collaboration with Marina Riccucci, professor of Italian Literature of Pisa University, the critical edition of the fifteenth-century poem ‘Istoria dell’assedio di Piombino del 1448’ written by Antonio degli Agostini. In 2022 he received a research grant at the Pisa University to study a seventeenth-century manuscript Historia della città di Piombino: opera inedita di Pier Domenico Corsi..
| Tutor Polese Remaggi Luca |  | Co-Tutor Fiorino Vinzia |
Research project
Title: «Essere a Magliano significa, ridendo, essere matti. History of Lucca’s psychiatric hospital from 1920 to 1952»
Lucca’s psychiatric hospital was foundend in 1776, when the aristocratic and republican Senate of Lucca legislated to suppress the Order of friars minor and sized their ancient abbay of Fregionaia to trasform the entire structure into an asylum, in which receiving mentality ills from Lucca’s jail. Since this choice, Maggiano became the site ubi insania mentis laborat, how we can still read on the commemorative placque inside the former hospital. The mental istitute was closed after a long amount of time, when in 1978 italian Parliament approved the ‘180 law’, also known as ‘Basaglia law’, which put end to the manicomial experience. Despite this long life not some many research has been done on it. This Phd project has the ambition to analyse, especially through clinical folders, the most important three decades of psychiatric history, which go from the early twenties of twentieth century to the second postwar period.
This project is articulated in three main research adresses :
1-Historicization and description of mental desease through medical folders.
If what determines that someone is fool is an amount of cultural elements, so madness itself is the product of a cultural and social context, which is subjected to the variation of the history and so to the relationship between the mental illness and certain values which communities establish. An example would be ‘leggi quadro Zanardelli (1904) e Rocco (1930)’ which had the priority to suppress behaviors potentially dangerous to social balance. Therefore the healtcare models were depended on this repressing priority. Usefull to these models were some macro-cathegories – depression, schizofrenia, hysteria – sensitives to ideological and moral influences, which follows gender and class prejudices. Finally studying the medical folders means to analyse the historical and social value of the psychiatric hospital at the root.
2-Fascism and psychiatry in Maggiano.
Psychiatric hospitals, during the fascist regime, were the instrument through which borderline personalities, ‘guilty’ of ethical diseases (alcoholism, syphilis and tuberculosis) were enstranged from society. Ethical diseases, despite their involuntary, were epiphenomenon of antifascist and antinational social danger. ‘Making useless men productive’, this was the fascist psychiatric idea. Through medical folders, is possibile to study and analyse the constitutive elements of the social danger and to connect the marginality situation to the peasent and mining reality, and which roles podestà, pretori, tribunals and commissioners played in psychiatric repression.
3-Psychiatric hospital and Second World War.
During the last World War, Maggiano hospital was the refuge for local people and not only. Stragglers, fugitives, partisans and starving came to Maggiano psychiatric hospital, due the bombing or the fear of being caught by Nazis and dying. But also soldiers were invested by the tragedy of the war, infact in Maggiano dozens of soldiers were interned in 1946 after being freed from prison camps. In the end, the history of Maggiano hospital can be a particular way to understand the war and the life that survives it.
