Il Paese dei pazzi

This is the story of an old asylum and the place where it was born, Girifalco, a Calabrian village of six thousand souls. The psychiatric hospital, founded in 1881, and the inhabitants of the village have always had a symbiotic relationship. Thanks to the ‘open doors’ practices initiated in the early 20th century, patients considered less serious wandered freely through the streets of the village. Madness and normality thus merged into a peculiar fresco that over the centuries has made Girifalco known in Italy and around the world as the ‘Land of the Mad’. The inhabitants, far from experiencing that appellation as a stigma, are very proud of their identity. What happens, however, to that little hamlet when the asylum is closed and ‘the mad’ leave? And is a madman still mad even if no one calls him that any more? What are we when they stop calling us by our usual name?

Episode 1 – The Power of the Wind
The Girifalco asylum stands in a lucky spot on a hill where the wind always blows. It was once thought that the movement of the air was a relief to restless minds. And in Calabria there were many. At the end of the 19th century, it was mainly epilepsy patients who were interned. There were so many that it was almost like an epidemic. For some, it was a tangible sign that the Calabrese were ‘a delinquent race’.

Episode 2 – The Golden Years
At the beginning of the twentieth century, some truly exceptional personalities arrived to direct the Girifalco asylum, who would change the way mental illness was treated forever. It was precisely in those years that the theory of open doors was born: patients could finally go outside, mingle with the townspeople. The walls dividing Girifalco from its asylum became thinner and thinner.

Episode 3 – The children of the asylum
We are in the 1970’s. The “madmen” of the town are now part of the community, they are family people to be loved. The asylum has become the Fiat of Girifalco: in every family there is at least one person working there. The whole life of the village revolves around the ‘inmates’. But History always reserves surprises: when the Basaglia law comes into force, everything changes and what seemed like a happy island turns out to be a place full of shadows and contradictions.

Episode 4 – Voices from within
What was once the village asylum is now a psychiatric residential facility housing some forty patients. We spent many hours with them trying to understand the past by questioning the present. We listened to their stories, their sounds, their thoughts, trying to capture a little of that unique and precious world with the microphone.

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