Abstract

[The City and its Margins. Asylums and Female Alienation in Edmondo De Amicis’ Giardino della follia] In 1899, Edmondo De Amicis published Nel giardino della follia (In the Garden of Madness): a narrative reportage about his encounter with women locked up within the walls of an asylum. By analyzing the narrative structure of De Amicis’ work, this contribution examines the relationship between the narrative of urban spaces and the medical and juridical discourse. The aim is to highlight the peculiar power relations underlying the labelling and categorisation of mental diseases on the eve of law no. 36 of 14 February 1904, which represented the first attempt to dictate an organic discipline for psychiatric assistance in liberal Italy. Under the outline, Nel giardino della follia expressed a series of unresolved tensions in the season of positivism, a series of ambiguities capable of revealing the set of contradictions and dysfunctions that would characterise the discipline of asylum confinement in Italy until the 'Psychiatric Revolution' of the 1960s and 1970s.