Centuries after Dante and Petrarca, Italy produced a style of writing that freed the Italian language from its constraints. No longer would elements like syntax, punctuation and adjectives rule the way Italians expressed themselves on paper. Instead, nouns would randomly hit the page, joined with mathematical signs and musical symbols.

The 20th century, being one of progress, meant that dynamism and speed would be the new way of life. Wars, wireless telegraph, the radio, airplanes, and cameras altered the idea behind distances and time. Movement itself called for a style that matched it. In the words of the man who found a way to convey it:

The rush of steam-emotion will blow apart the pipe of the sentence, the valves of punctuation, and the regular bolts of adjectival decoration.

It was 1912-13 when Italian poet Filippo Marinetti, founder of futurism, introduced the literary side of the movement, known as “parole in libertà” (words in freedom). This push for liberated words was laid out in his second and third manifestos1, however they existed upon the foundations he laid out years earlier.

Birth of Italian Futurism

In 1902, his first poetry book La conquete des étoiles showcases Symbolist/proto-Futurist elements, like loosened syntax, free verse, repetition and exclamatory energy, as can be seen in the opening lines:

Hola-hé ! Hola-hé ! Hola-ho !

O Vagues antiques, ô Vétérans de la Mer Souveraine, debout, guerriers puissants aux barbes vénérables d’écume!

Debout ! Debout, nos frères !

Yet, Italian futurism itself was born from a collision, both figurative and literal. In a 1908 car crash, while trying to steer clear of two cyclists, Marinetti’s high-end motorcar crashed, sending him into a ditch. Upon being fished out, he felt determined to free himself from decorative excesses and refined aestheticism.

One year later, Marinetti’s Manifesto del Futurismo debuted in four Italian newspapers and then on the front page of the Parisian newspaper Le Figaro [1]. Aside from it laying out the eleven tenets of the movement, he concludes with a fervent argument in two parts. In one, he lambasts the existing cultural order which he sees as the status quo of reverence:

Italy has been too long the great second-hand market. We want to get rid of the innumerable museums which cover it with innumerable cemeteries […] To make a visit once a year, as one goes to see the graves of our dead once a year, that we could allow! We can even imagine placing flowers once a year at the feet of the Gioconda!

And in the second part of his argument, he targets his own revolution, saying he doesn’t seek to replace the old canon with a new permanent one. Rather he expects to be overthrown and even invites it. In other words, constant generational destruction:

The oldest among us are not yet thirty years old: we have therefore at least ten years to accomplish our task. When we are forty let younger and stronger men than we throw us in the waste paper basket like useless manuscripts!

His style evolved further with the 1914 novel Zang Tumb Tuuum. It’s a first-hand account of the siege of Adrianople in the Balkan War, which Marinetti had witnessed as a war reporter. The title reflects mechanical noises, with zang representing the firing of an artillery shell; tumb, its explosion upon impact; and tuuum, the resulting echo. In his signature style, the book closes with the following [2]:

These weights thicknesses noises smells molecular whirlwinds chains webs corridors of analogies rivalries and synchronisms offered offered offered offered up as a gift to my Futurist friends poets painters musicians and noise intoners.

Word Tables

One year after Marinetti launched Futurism, a group of painters in Milan published their own Futurist manifestos, establishing Futurist painting as a distinct sub-movement. Like the literary side, they rejected reverence for the past and found inspiration in the energy and chaos of contemporary life. This radical experimentation aided in the development of a visual component to liberated words.

This flows from Marinetti’s prescription for Futurist writing, which was not only phonetic but also visual, inspiring the invention of specific tables of words (tavole parolibere). Italian Futurist artists such as Pino Masnata and Fortunato Depero ran with the style, making it their own. Masnata’s work carried a multi-dimensional approach that was sometimes described as poliespressività, combining visual, verbal, and auditory elements.

These word sets displayed a “graphic-verbal duality” and “phonic-verbal communication”. In other words, texts of poetry resolved into graphic form, expressing themselves through fragments of images, sounds, noises, onomatopoeias, metaphors and synesthesias. Other Futurists, like Ardengo Soffici, also explored the word-table format: his 1915 artist’s book BÏF§ZF+18 is considered one of the most accomplished examples of Florentine Futurist words-in-freedom, in which he adapted the movement’s experimental spirit.

Conclusion

Futurism would continue to evolve with a second wave a decade after the first wave had begun. The newer version was a more fluid and less rigid movement than the first, freed from the voice of Marinetti and with more room to experiment.

FT Marinetti tried to dynamite grammar (and that’s not all2). But nobody replaced Dante Alighieri. The shockwaves of Futurism were absorbed and filtered through centuries of literary and cultural tradition. The experiments with the avant-garde couldn’t replace all that came before. Europe’s strength is that it can confront radical upheavals and continue to produce works of enduring beauty and thought. It also turns out that Marinetti and Soffici championed Fascism, which history did not look kindly on. And much like that political current, they left their mark but couldn’t erase the foundations that came before.

Additional reading

1 - The Futurist suit becomes anti-neutral (Historia Minuta)

Sources

1 - The Futurist Manifesto

2 - Italian Futurism 1909-1944

3 - Tavole parolibere

4 - Montagne russe a Coney Island, Fortunato Depero, 1930

While Italy’s North-South divide often focuses on the South’s economic struggles, the medieval city-republics of the North (ex. Venice, Genoa, Milan, and Florence) built a unique tradition of cooperation among citizens, merchant guilds, and generalized trust among strangers. This puts them closer to the high-trust cultures of northern Europe than to the more family-focused, top-down patterns in the South.

In an era before centralized authority existed, protection was provided by the city itself. These so-called communes, in the late 11th and early 12th centuries, were at the center of self-governing corporations where residents swore oaths of mutual defense and peace-keeping. Born from a compromise between feudal nobility and a rising bourgeoisie1, these northern Italian communes grew in ways that other autonomy movements in Europe2 couldn’t. In places like France and England, strengthening national monarchies kept similar experiments in check.

This type of self-organization was a result of a secularization process that ocurred between the High and Late Middle Ages with the growth of the bourgeois-mercantile class. This arose from advancements in agriculture that led to a population boom, which freed up labor and intensified competition. Under these conditions, practicing a trade became more rational, with time seen less as a divine gift and more as a practical resource to be measured and managed.

The Commercial Revolution and Renaissance humanism pushed this shift further by bringing practical calculation into everyday economic life. Tools like double-entry bookkeeping and Arabic numerals helped organize trade, while logic and arithmetic were taught to prepare people for business. Legal tools such as insurance separated risk from individual fate, making commerce more rule-based and less dependent on personal or family ties.

Hanseatic & Protestant influences

Northern Italian cities were part of a bigger European picture, not examples in isolation. Like the Hanseatic League up north, cities such as Lübeck and Hamburg started out in the late 12th century as small groups of towns and merchants banding together to protect trade and expand their markets. Over the next couple of centuries, that loose network grew to include hundreds of towns across northern and central Europe, with shared rules, protections, and tightly connected commercial and family networks.

Northern Italy did something very similar. In Venice, the Arsenale and merchant tribunals managed trade and settled disputes, while Genoa used consulates and merchant guilds to protect contracts and organize long-distance commerce. Meanwhile, Milan’s artisan guilds set standards, ran apprenticeships, and managed local markets. Many cities, including Florence, had a podestà (a magistrate who enforced the law and kept the peace) and later a capitano del popolo (a representative for artisans and small merchants who balanced the podestà’s authority).

These institutions shaped who held power. In Florence, the popolo grasso (wealthy merchants and bankers belonging to major guilds) dominated political life, while the popolo minuto (lower classes of artisans and laborers) had far less influence. Across northern Italy, this combination of guilds, magistrates, and civic representatives created a structured, high-trust environment that let commerce and cooperation grow beyond the family or neighborhood, essentially copying the networks of the Hanseatic League.

Before the rise of communes and these mercantile networks, trust in Europe was mostly limited to family, clan, or village. Broader society lacked the institutions and norms needed for cooperation among strangers, making high-trust interactions rare and even risky. Northern Italian cities helped build that framework, spreading trust horizontally through guilds, contracts, and public duties.

Later developments, such as the Protestant Reformation in northern Europe, reinforced these patterns. Promoting literacy, civic responsibility, and social accountability, the Reformation encouraged individuals to engage directly with texts, think independently, and adopt the kind of ethics that lead to dependability, honesty, and honoring contracts. These cultural changes increased the society-wide trust and forward-looking behavior that northern Italian communes had already started establishing, further setting high-trust regions apart from those dominated by hierarchical or kin-based structures3.

Contributing factors

The economic and civic energy of northern Italy fits into bigger patterns across Europe. The French geographer Roger Brunet noticed a difference between “active” and “passive” spaces and, in 1989, described a West European “backbone” (aka Blue Banana), an urban-industrial corridor running from northern England through the Rhine Valley to northern Italy, especially Turin, Milan, and Genoa. For Brunet, this European Backbone wasn’t something new. It grew out of long-standing historical factors, from medieval trade routes to the buildup of industrial capital, showing how geography and existing infrastructure helped some regions develop faster than others.

Northern Italy’s role shows up in patterns of human achievement too. Charles Murray, in Human Accomplishment, measured contributions to the arts and sciences between 1400 and 1950 and found that most came from Western, Central, and Southern Europe. This suggests that northern Italy’s medieval communes’ combined commercial density with unusually high literacy and durable civic institutions created conditions that supported cultural production over long periods rather than in short bursts.

Climate may be a third factor. In colder, seasonal environments, survival depended on anticipating future conditions, such as storing food, building shelter, and organizing labor in order to survive. In warmer, stable climates, there was less pressure to think ahead or innovate. Over generations, this kind of seasonal pressure could favor societies that are more organized and forward-looking. Seasonal thinking may have reinforced the advantages of the European core, helping explain why northern Italy, along with other backbone regions, became a hub of innovation and development.

Taken together, these factors help define what I’m calling the questione settentrionale, or Northern Question. Northern Italy followed a different regional trajectory, rooted in structures that proved remarkably durable.

Four decades after unification, southern Italy exposed the limits of a unified state. Political unity had been achieved, but the administrative kind required managed integration once it became clear the South wouldn’t catch up on its own. The Kingdom of Naples, for example, had long operated with weaker institutions, different land systems, and centralized rule. Unification in 1861, however, didn’t fix this. It simply transplanted Piedmontese law (setting the standards by which the rest of Italy would be judged) onto a very different society.

A unified Italy, while beneficial in the long term, stripped power, status, and control not only from the Kingdom of Naples but from the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The result was fiscal pressure, social unrest marked by revolts and repression, widespread rural banditry, mass emigration to the Americas, recurring cholera outbreaks, and fragile local institutions.

Naples had already been singled out for state intervention with the 1885 Legge Napoli, aimed at urban and sanitary renewal. It was the first recognition that the city required separate treatment1. And while it did achieve limited success in its aims, it also displaced poor residents and failed to revive the city’s economy.

Amid a banking crisis and general unrest in the 1890s, momentum built for a renewed attempt at fixing lingering issues, but on a broader scale. The official response came in the form of the Legge Speciale per Napoli of 1904 which removed or reduced customs taxes on raw materials and consumer goods, among other measures that sought to boost employment and industry. Again, the results were mixed but it was the first real attempt to address the “Questione meridionale” (Southern Question) through economic and industrial policy on a regional level rather than merely city-wide, like the 1885 law.

Southern Question

The expression “Southern Question” refers to the age-old internal political dilemma between the North and the South of the nation, determined by economic, civil, social, and cultural imbalance. There are many causes for the divide.

The origins are often traced back to the medieval period. Much of the North experienced a long communal phase, in which self-governing cities developed civic institutions, commercial law, and local administrative traditions. Meanwhile, the South remained under centralized monarchies and never developed the same culture of municipal autonomy.

This divide was reinforced by centuries of foreign rule. Under Spain, the South was governed as part of a wider imperial system. Northern Italy, on the other hand, was more closely tied to more advanced French and central European administrative and economic models.

Geography and culture deepened the differences. The Po Valley’s flat and fertile terrain and trade routes favored commerce and early industrialization, while northern dialects formed more continuous linguistic zones. Southern dialects, influenced by political centralization and regional separation, as well as Greek and Arabic, evolved more independently, strengthening long-standing regional differences.

After effects

The after effects of the two Neapolitan laws were many - including on urban planning. The 1885 post-cholera law was behind the landfill that buried the historic Chiaia beach (once a sweeping sandy shore celebrated in Grand Tour-era paintings) beneath the Caracciolo promenade found today. Two decades later, the 1904 law placed massive steelworks in the Bagnoli quarter, transforming the pristine Phlegraean bay, once envisioned by famed architect Lamont Young as a Neapolitan Venice, into an industrial zone [1].

As the 1904 law attracted northern investors to establish heavy industries, they ended up absorbing local firms and providing short-term employment gains in an era of continued corruption. It also paid for better electricity, trade schools, worker housing, and a bigger port to increase trade, but most of the grand plans to reshape the city never got off the ground [2].

Nonetheless, it can’t be argued that there was a mini-boom, that is, a rapid industrial surge in Naples between 1904 and 1914. If it weren’t for WWI, perhaps Naples might have potentially rivaled northern cities, but the war redirected state contracts to northern firms2, forcing southern factory closures and cheap acquisitions. This ties into a broader argument on how the conflict strengthened the North-South divide by prioritizing the industrial triangle of Milan, Turin and Genoa [3].

Critics, however, ultimately viewed the law as being too narrowly focused, neglecting broader southern regions and creating economic dependency on northern capital - a trend that continued in the interwar and post-war periods. More than a century later, the debate persists. Administrative law professor Giovanni Leone has argued that any further special laws solely for Naples would reinforce harmful stereotypes of the city [4]:

Naples has always been considered an exception. “Napoli è Napoli.” “Bella e maledetta.” “Unica e impossibile.” “Napoli non è l’Italia: è un mondo a sé.” Expressions repeated for centuries, clichés so deeply rooted that they have become tradition. But this tendency to exaggerate Naples’ uniqueness risks, according to some, pushing the community into a corner. “Naples does not need parochialism or populism,” Leone stresses. “The city is part of a country that is central to Europe, and it is from this perspective that we must think.”

Leone argues that special laws and initiatives for Naples are consistently partial and reactive. Instead, he advocates a national agency dedicated to the entire Mezzogiorno3, capable of channeling resources (including a reversed north-south allocation of EU funds), prioritizing sustainable infrastructure, and shielding projects from organized crime4.

More than a century after the 1904 law’s partial efforts to incentivize Naples’ industrial revival, the Southern Question persists not only economically but, as economist Pasquale Saraceno observed in 1989, as an “ethical-political” challenge to Italy’s national unity [5]. Only a unified vision, that sees the Mezzogiorno’s potential as integral to Italy’s future, can finally move the country beyond the divisions it inherited from unification.

Additional information

1 - How Italy Became the Most Divided Country in Europe [29m]

2 - La Napoli Del Futuro - Il Sogno di Lamont Young [50m, subtitles]

3 - Sud: questione meridionale o nazionale? [54m]

Sources

1 - 1884-1904, i vent’anni del delitto di Stato: quando Napoli fu privata del suo mare

2 - Legge speciale per Napoli e mini boom economico di inizio Novecento

3 - Quando il Nord comprò La Campania

4 - “Per rilanciare Napoli e il Mezzogiorno serve un’agenzia nazionale”, la proposta di Giovanni Leone

5 - Questione meridionale ancora aperta. Superare il divario tra Nord e Sud centrale per ritrovare unità nazionale

Starting in the 15th century, Venice was emerging as a printing hub, when itinerant peddlers known as venditori ambulanti began disseminating pamphlets, ballads, and religious tracts1 across the peninsula. During the Reformation, this grassroots network shaped public opinion, with peddlers navigating Catholic censorship to distribute Protestant and Catholic texts. These early distributors, often undocumented, were central to cultural and religious shifts, making printed ideas mobile.

From hubs in Venice, Bologna, Rome and Naples, these printed works radiated outward. Below is a map of early printing towns across Italy. These were places where incunabula2 were produced and then disseminated. The colored dots indicate the decade in which they started to crop up, as well as how many editions were being produced and where.

Yet producing books was only part of the story - getting them into readers’ hands across Europe presented a whole new set of challenges. In an article from The Groiler Club on The Book Peddlers of France, the author states how difficult it was early on in Europe to take possession of books [1]:

Rough terrain slowed down shipments, licensing and copyright laws limited what books could be sold where, and religious and secular disputes over the content of the books further complicated matters.

Nonetheless, according to an article on an exhibition titled Colporteurs – I venditori di stampe e libri e il loro pubblico (Colporteurs - Print and book sellers and their audience) [2], bureaucratic and logsticial hurdles weren’t always detrimental:

The peddler’s trade was often carried out with dignity and professionalism, enabling social ascent, the purchase of a shop, or even a publishing house, and should not be confused with the ever-mobile groups of charlatans, swindlers, or beggars who frequented the same roads and markets.

The brief article goes on to mention how these hawkers spurred the creation of a collective European imaginary. Expanding on this idea, epic printed poems from the late 15th and early 16th century Italy, such as Orlando Innamorato, Orlando Furioso, and Morgante offer a glimpse into that shared imagination. Produced and distributed via early printing presses in Venice and other towns, they spread heroic deeds, via tales of knights, love, and moral struggles within a Christian framework.

This religious backdrop was never meant to be far from the minds of readers - Rome and the Holy See made sure of that. As printing flourished, controlling its content became a priority for authorities, leading to formal mechanisms of censorship.

Index of Forbidden Books

The Index Librorum Prohibitorum, or Index of Forbidden Books, was a heretical list of banned books that started in 1560 and lasted four centuries. Perfect candidates for exclusion included theologians challenging papal power, astronomers pushing Copernican ideas, progressive philosophers linked to pantheism, and those who questioned faith with reason. The Index went even further, banning Protestant texts on secular subjects such as botany, medicine, jurisprudence, geography and cosmography.

One of its six regulae, or rules - that was more a consequence than a criterion for banning - was related to ownership. Catholics were forbidden from reading, owning, selling, or distributing listed books under penalty of sin. For the Church, printing was a double-edged sword; on one hand, it allowed for the spread of the holy word but, on the other, its democratic nature made way for all manner of competing and unrelated thought to flourish. This was, after all, the same general period as a split in the Church known as the Protestant Reformation.

Permissions to print

Catholic censors declared a book nihil obstat3 if the publication had no offending declarations, followed by an imprimatur4 from a bishop permitting its publication. To give a real-world idea of what this meant, of the roughly 8,150 editions5 printed in Venice from 1550 to 1599, around 71 new titles per year required a governmental imprimatur [3].

In this case, the use of “governmental” refers to permission from the Republic of Venice, which is different from the Catholic Church’s imprimatur for doctrinal approval. In other words, as an important printing hub, Venice exercised independent control over its presses while occasionally pushing back against the Church’s Index restrictions. At times, this backfired, as wealthy Venetian bookstore owners often had shops across Italy.

With countries - or rather, kingdoms and republics - tightly controlling the printing process within their borders, it led to a market for the clandestine sale and trade of forbidden publications - a job that was carried out by hawkers, including transnationally. One is reminded of the Tesini pedlars from the Italian Alps, active from the 16th to 19th centuries, who distributed affordable prints across Europe on foot.

The demand for hidden texts naturally shifts the focus to how such materials reached their audiences and the distinction between distribution and dissemination. A study that investigates these terms is The Dissemination of European Popular Print: Exploring Comparative Approaches [4]. In it, the authors show the physical transportation of printed materials like books and pamphlets differed from broader cultural processes, including the meanings, social interactions, and multimediality (eg, oral performances, adaptations, and non-commercial exchanges) attributed to them.

The paper also opens up the discussion to the many types of sellers, such as peddler, hawker, chapman, street vendor, and colporteur. In turn, these could further be categorized by wealth, credit, trade practices, or specialization in printed matter versus other goods. So while they weren’t necessarily “charlatans, swindlers, or beggars”, they also weren’t homogeneous either.

Conclusion

No matter the viewpoint, book peddlars benefited the local government via taxes and licenses, allowed low income residents to have an income and supplied literature to people in rural areas, among other things. They were crucial to both the dissemination and distribution of written ideas, and thus popular movements, in addition to helping form cohesive cultural identities.

In an era when Venice’s ruling class curbed open discourse to preserve order, lively public chatter filled streets and squares, where peddlers democratized ideas by spreading printed materials to the masses. Their work fueled Italy’s literary spread, leaving their mark in urban spaces, rural homes and everywhere in between.

Sources

1 - The Book Peddlers of France

2 - Colporteurs – I venditori di stampe e libri e il loro pubblico

3 - The Roman Inquisition and the Venetian Press, 1540-1605 (pdf)

4 - The Dissemination of European Popular Print: Exploring Comparative Approaches (pdf)

5 - The normative role of public opinion in the republican experience of Renaissance Venice (pdf)

If there’s a single book that defines Italian cooking, it’s La Scienza in Cucina e l’Arte di Mangiar Bene (Science in the kitchen and the art of eating well), by Pellegrino Artusi. Written all the way back in 1891, it originally wasn’t a bestseller. “L’Artusi”, as the book is sometimes referred to, originally consisted of 475 recipes - now 790 - from all over Italy, which required two decades to gather and curate, and selling 52,000 copies while the author was still alive1.

Even though Pellegrino Artusi was from a very well-off background, his book was geared towards middle-class families and everyday housewives. Not only that, it wasn’t the first book of its kind - there were other cookbooks featuring regional cuisine - and he wasn’t even a cook, so we can think of him more like the first food blogger of his time, or perhaps equally, an amateur scientist.

He also pushed back against the dominant haute cuisine, which was the French model of fancy, highbrow cooking. This was not because Italians weren’t sophisticated, but because such cuisine didn’t fit the needs or tastes of Italy’s growing middle class, especially the urban women who were starting to run their own kitchens [2].

This shift in culinary focus occurred in a country still recovering from centuries of economic stagnation. As one study notes [3]:

From the 17th century until the end of the 19th, GDP rose as the population increased. Yet per capita income slowly diminished together with real wages, urbanization, and living standards.

The book’s title is intentional as it aligns with the 19th-century positivist movement that sought to apply scientific principles to all areas of life, even cooking. In fact, Artusi argued that the cookbooks of the era weren’t useful as they didn’t include basic information like dosages. In the preface, however, he describes a less rigid, more playful side to his approach [1]:

The kitchen is a little rascal; it often and willingly drives you to despair, but it also brings pleasure, because when you succeed or overcome a difficulty, you feel satisfaction and sing victory.

If you don’t aspire to become a master chef in some grand court, I don’t believe it’s necessary to be born with a saucepan on your head to succeed. All you need is passion, great attention, and the habit of being precise. Then, always choose the finest quality ingredients, those alone will make you shine.

So what exactly made Artusi’s book special? Well, the breadth and scope of the recipes he gathered, for one, and he did it at a very opportune time in Italian history - in the period during and after the unification of Italy. In other words, he helped populate people’s minds with a novel notion: what it means to be Italian. And it apparently worked, as Italy and its food culture are tied at the hip - or rather, the panza2.

Political unification did not mean cultural or even economic unification. Linguistically, they couldn’t understand each other. But food has long been the great unifier, though it would be wrong to say that his initial editions were truly representative of the peninsula and the isles. Artusi, being from Romagna, favored both northern and central regions including Tuscany and what is now Emilia-Romagna. That said, a later edition in the year of his death, included many more contributions which more fairly represented the newly formed country.

How did he do it? By trying recipes he already knew, collecting others from those around him, and roaming from restaurant to restaurant, bakery to bakery. He took meticulous notes and also any anecdotes that were told to him in the moment, such as the situations and circumstances around which certain foods came to be cooked. Perhaps too many anecdotes, as the book didn’t sell well initially and was said to be boring, with too many irrelevant facts. Some shops would reportedly receive the books for sale but when no one bought them, the shopkeepers used the pages as wrapping paper for items purchased. Not quite like taking a hammer to a David and using the pieces for gravel, but perhaps sacrilegious in its own way.

Some traditional foods weren’t included simply because he personally did not like how they tasted, though others were included despite his distaste for them. People started to send him their recipes, too, once the book caught on. With no children, never married, and only two beloved cats3, he left the rights to his book to his two kitchen helpers who were at his side the whole time.

Artusi worked on his recipes until his final days. In his eighties, he could still see just as well as always, and regularly revised subsequent editions. By age 90, the year he died, he was still correcting recipes. La Scienza’s success surprised and delighted him, keeping him engaged until the very end [4].

Fittingly, given his legacy as the creator of the first true Italian cookbook, his death in March 1911 coincided with Italy’s 50th anniversary, marked by celebrations across the country. On the centennial of Artusi’s death, in 2011, there were many celebrations across the country as well. And that’s not all. Since 1997, his hometown of Forlimpopoli has celebrated the Festa Artusiana, an annual food and entertainment festival in his honor.

Effects

L’Artusi, which has sold over a million copies, and has been translated into ten languages, remains a beloved classic. Its modern success is in part thanks to a version published by Einaudi in 1970 and edited by noted historian and gastronomist Piero Camporesi who once reflected how La Scienza did more for national unification than the 1827 book I promessi sposi (The Betrothed) managed to do. And as the latter is the most widely read novel in Italian and a cornerstone of Italian literature whose use of Florentine Italian helped standardize the national language, that’s no small feat!

The curious reader can peruse the more than 1,800 letters he received from all over Italy, and the world, using the digital archive at Casa Artusi. These were the letters that contained the recipes that helped build the book and the gratitude that grounded the project - a living dialogue between Artusi and a nation finding itself through food.

As famed chef Massimo Bottura said in a 1st edition reprint, “L’Artusi paved the way for us to get to know ourselves and our nation, one spoonful at a time.”

Additional Information

1 - Culinary Luminaries: Pellegrino Artusi | The New School (video, 1h18)

2 - Pellegrino Artusi. L'unità d'Italia in cucina (video, 14m, English subs)

3 - Verso una cucina, lingua ed identità nazionale: uno sguardo storico attraverso La Scienza in Cucina di Pellegrino Artusi (pdf)

Sources

1 - L’Artusi (both first & modern editions, pdf, in Italian)

2 - Pellegrino Artusi - La scienza in cucina e l’arte di unire l’Italia a tavola

3 - The Italian Economy Before Unification, 1300–1861

4 - Artusi, un secolo dopo: il gentiluomo in cucina

5 - Mostra Pellegrino Artusi. Il tempo e le opere

When one thinks of Italy in the last 20 years, one process that comes to mind is certainly its declining demographics, on both ends of the spectrum - whether death due to old age or emigration and brain drain. According to a 2024 article from Fortune [1], more than a million Italians have left in the past 10 years - a third of them aged 25 to 34. They blame low salaries, lack of recognition for their skills and high taxes [2], the conditio sine qua non of their decision to seek better opportunities abroad.

In cross-country comparisons, Italy ranks just above Romania with less than 20 percent of 25-64 year-olds with degrees, compared to 18.78 percent in Romania. Meanwhile this figure is 50.8 percent in Ireland, 40 percent in France and Spain, and 30 percent in Portugal and Germany [3].

As such, it was surprising to discover that Italy is a hub for science and research. As of 2023, the country was the world’s sixth-highest producer of scientific articles, publishing more than 155,000 documents - most of them in the field of medicine [4]. In the 2024 Global Innovation Index, which evaluates innovation based on more than 80 indicators across 133 countries, Italy ranked 26th [5].

Helping to coordinate all the research is none other than the Ministry of University and Research which oversees the country’s scientific and academic landscape, supporting both universities and institutions. In 2013, it launched ResearchItaly, a web magazine dedicated to showcasing and promoting Italian scientific production [6].

Beyond its institutional framework, Italy actively engages the public in science. The SHARPER project is Italy’s official initiative for the European Researchers’ Night, an annual EU-wide event that brings science to the public through interactive activities, talks, and workshops [7]. Taking place in multiple cities across Italy, SHARPER connects universities, research centers, and institutions with local communities, with the aim of making research more accessible.

Italy is also home to some of Europe’s best research institutions. In Rome, the Accademia dei Lincei, one of the oldest scientific academies in the world, has been in operation since the early 17th century. Deep beneath the Apennine Mountains, the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso stands as the world’s largest underground research center, a focal point for the study of particle physics. Meanwhile, the National Research Council, Italy’s main public research body, ranks among the top global institutions for scientific output.

This strong research infrastructure means Italy’s scientific achievements shape global knowledge. But within the country, no place does it more than Trieste, with its concentration of international research centers.

Trieste - City of Knowledge

With 37 researchers per thousand inhabitants, Trieste holds the European record for the highest concentration of researchers. By comparison, Italy's national average stands at just 4.9 per thousand, while even Finland - a country known for its strong focus on research - does not surpass 15. In total, Trieste is home to an impressive 10,400 researchers and teachers, making up nearly 5% of the city’s population - a figure that highlights its importance in science [8].

The city hosts several internationally renowned research institutions, including the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (ICGEB), and the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA). These institutions, alongside its universities and scientific centers, have made Trieste a leading hub for research in physics, biomedicine, environmental sciences, and advanced technology.

This concentration of scientific activity is further supported by the Trieste Città della Conoscenza (Trieste City of Knowledge) initiative starting in 2007, a collaborative effort among the city’s major institutions to promote scientific research, innovation, and education [9]. This project strengthens Trieste’s reputation as a place for learning and discovery, and further encourages worldwide collaboration and public engagement with science.

Recognizing its scientific significance, Trieste was named the European City of Science in 2020, serving as the host for EuroScience Open Forum, Europe’s largest interdisciplinary meeting on science and innovation. This designation highlighted Trieste’s impact on global research and its role in advancing science.

Conclusion

Niceties and accolades aside, Italy - especially its government - will have to do more if it wants to maintain the status quo in Trieste, elevate other major cities, and both attract and bring back talent. Achieving this is easier said than done, particularly in the less prosperous meridionale (Southern Italy).

One doesn’t need to go all the way back to the golden age of contributions, but it’s important to remember the intellectual heritage from which Italy draws. From Da Vinci, Galileo, Fibonacci, and Fermi to Marconi, Volta, Matteucci, and Perotto, they laid the groundwork for modern science, revolutionized entire fields, and made inventions that shaped centuries.

If Italy wants to become the Paese della Conoscenza, it needs to move away from the bastone (stick) - ex, poor remuneration, undervaluation, and disregard - and cultivate the carote.

Additional Information

1 - Science in Europe: by the numbers (2019)

2 - Italy - Love it or leave it (documentary trailer, 2011)

Sources

1 - Brain drain in Italy

2 - Tax break clampdown adds to Italian brain drain fears

3 - Italy is stuck in a European brain drain

4 - Scimago Journal & Country Rank: Italy

5 - Global Innovation Index 2024 (pg 173, pdf)

6 - ResearchItaly

7 - SHARPER Project

8 - Trieste, è record europeo di ricercatori: 37 ogni mille abitanti. Più della Finlandia

9 - Trieste City of Knowledge

An article from late 2020 in the Italian Navy magazine Rivista Marittima, references a plan by the English to divide up Italy after WWII. The scheme was reportedly presented at the Tehran Conference in November 1943, where Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin met for the first time to coordinate several aspects of post-war planning, including the future of Italy, which had surrendered a few months earlier.

As can be seen from the map above, Italy wouldn’t have just gone to the English, but rather to a slew of countries, under an AMGOT (Allied Military Government of Occupied Territories). Here's a breakdown of the countries and the areas they would control:

• Yugoslavia (Istria and the Veneto region)

• France (Milan, Piedmont, Liguria, and Valle d'Aosta)

• UK (Sardinia, Sicily, and part of Calabria)

• Greece (southern Italy)

• US & the Pope (central regions from Emilia to Naples)

• Austria (South Tyrol)

Roosevelt and Stalin both reportedly rejected the idea of partitioning Italy. But if one chooses to believe that the proposal did, in fact, happen, it doesn’t mean that Italy only exists today due to the American and Soviet veto of the British bid. Rather, it’s that an AMGOT is applied temporarily, not permanently. Furthermore, such a system - in which the French controlled the proposed areas and the US and Britian controlled the rest - was in place after the war. It was only in the years between 1945 and 1947 that Italy regained control of their country and became a republic.

Notes: The few instances where this proposal was mentioned online, in Italian, it was met with incredulity by readers, who often called it a “stronzate” (ie, BS). The facts show that the partition of certain European countries did occur in WWII, and the article from the Italian Navy magazine is properly sourced, yet I can find no documents in English or Italian to confirm the English proposal.

Among the countless sententia, or popular moral sayings, that have historically existed, the adage that “Rome wasn’t built in a day” is oft-repeated. Originally mentioned in a 12th century Flemish court, it was popularized for early modern audiences in the 1500s, by playwright John Heywood in a book of proverbs. At the turn of the 20th century it was included in a book of medieval French poetry, Li Proverbe au Vilain, where one finds the following line, Rome ne fu[t] pas faite toute en un jour. The phrase in its spoken form possibly goes back much further, perhaps even centuries earlier to the very founding of Rome.

The building of Rome, at least from its origin to the height of the Roman Empire, was a process that lasted between nine and ten centuries. It starts with the legend of twin brothers, Romulus and Remus - raised by a she-wolf [pictured above] and a shepherd on the banks of the Tiber river - when they decided to build a city there [1]. A disagreement arose where Romulus killed his brother and named the new settlement Rome, after himself, and the reason why he did it speaks to the ancient beliefs in gods, ghosts and rites that shaped the city’s initial growth.

Pomerium, Augurs, Cippi

In the case of Rome, logic also played a part in the decision. The location along the Tiber river offered a natural trade route, and the easiest place to cross the river is where Tiber island - the only one along the river within the confines of the city - is located. But logic alone does not a city make.

Pre-Roman indigenous cultures such as the Etruscan, Latin and Italic peoples that inhabited the region didn’t simply found settlements based on geography. Rather, a set of intricate and detailed rituals, including divinations, had to be followed first. These rules weren’t limited to the location but also the geographical layout and urban planning of a new village.

One of the most important aspects to be determined beforehand was a consultation with the gods and a communion with the natural world, which was the work of the augur, or priest. The communion was centered around a practice known as taking the auspices, which meant the augur had to discern the meaning of bird signs including the direction they flew in, if they were alone or in formation, silent or making noises. Interpreting bird omens is a practice that both predates and transcends Rome.

Auspicia were dividied into two types, those requested by man and those that were doled out spontaneously by the gods. These were further divided into the different kinds of signs separated by type of event or animal, and complicated by a myriad of ways one could circumvent negative signs, such as through manipulating the interpretation or selectively framing the events.

Once a favorable location was found, a religious demarcation known as a pomerium was made in order to separate the sacred ground of the settlement from the rural Roman land, known as the ager romanus, or agro romano. The pomerium itself was made of two parallel lines, with a marked space in between for the trapping of malevolent forces that might negatively affect those inside the protected space. The boundary also meant that no weapons, except those carried by the emperor's guards, were allowed to enter the pomerium.

When Romulus and Remus were deciding on where to found the new settlement that would eventually become Rome, Romulus had a preferrence for Palatine Hill while his brother wanted it to be on Aventine Hill. According to the legend, this dispute led to Remus defiantely crossing the pomerium as Romulus was in the process of marking the outer bounds, with some versions saying that Remus was armed as he did it. The desecration of the sacred territory was sufficient that Romulus killed his brother and became the sole founder.

The boundaries of the original pomerium were reportedly deemed Roma quadrata, or squared Rome due to its rough outline, and only included the small area surrounding Palatine Hill. As the city grew over the centuries and military victories were had, the limits were marked by cippi, or marker stones. As Rome became more of a target by foreign military incursions, different Roman leaders erected fortified walls around the city that - while not replacing Rome’s religious boundaries - marked its practical limits.

The first of the two fortifications was the Servian Walls, built with volcanic rock in the 4th century BC, and which included the seven hills of Rome. As time passed, the city outgrew its boundaries, and the protection provided by field armies surrounding it lessened the need for the wall. Nearly four centuries later, the era of Pax Romana brought peace and stability to the region, further lessening the need. However, barbarian invasions - among other factors that were collectively known as the Crisis of the Third Century - brought about the end of the era and hastened the desire for new and improved fortifications, at which point the Aurelian Walls were built.

Gridiron layout

The arrangement of settlements also adhered to specific rituals. An umbilicus urbis, or navel of the city, was decided upon as a symbolic center that aided in calculating the geometries of the settlement or city. Next to it was placed a mundus, which was essentially a hole in the ground into which the initial inhabitants threw emblematic items representing daily life, as an offering to the spirits of their ancestors. The umbilicus and mundus gave birth to a new city.

From that point, the city’s expansion was mathematically divided in a gridiron layout by an initial crossroads known as the cardo (North to South commercial street) and the decumanus maximus (East to West street for general traffic of people and goods). An easy way of knowing where the crossroads of a Roman city is located is to find the forum as they were normally located near each other.

The overall urban design was based on a unit of measurement known as a “century”, and the total set of centuries was called a “centuration”. This type of grid - although widely employed throughout the Roman Empire - was not originally of Roman origin. It was borrowed from the Greeks, who surely borrowed it from other civilizations. One can find similar concepts at earlier times, in the Indus Valley, Ancient Egypt, Babylon, Ancient China and even Pre-Columbian America.

Road network

The Roman road network can be divided in two elements: the infrastructure and its use cases. The Via Consularis were the consular roads that radiated outward from Rome itself and extended to the far-reaching territories of the Empire. Somewhat similar to the decumanus maximus on the local level, it was built to facilitate the movement of people, goods and mail across vast regions. In short, it allowed for the constant flow of traffic and communications for administrative, commercial and military purposes.

While the Via Consularis provided the underlying network, another kind of network was operating on top of it. The Cursus Publicus was the Imperial Service that streamlined the movement and transfer of both government officials and vital correspondence. It was essentially a fast lane, but not in the sense of an exclusive expressway. What made it fast was its relay system of fresh horses and riders at intervals along each route - a system that was also employed in Ancient Persia and China. If all roads lead to Rome, the reason lies in these networks.

While not exactly a localized yet more modern version in any kind of comparative sense, the heart of contemporary Rome provides an example of how connectivity persists in the Eternal City today. Technically known as the A90, the Grande Raccordo Anulare (GRA) - which is simply called il Raccordo by locals - is a modern ring road and the most trafficked highway in the country.

Rooted in a 1878 law regarding the land reclamation of the agro romano, the decision to build it was taken in the 1940s post-war period (just prior to the country becoming a Republic) and the first section was inaugurated in 1951. As it stands, the GRA encircles Rome at a distance from the city center of about 11 km, covering 68 km of road with 33 exits at around every 2 km. Creating a road that encircles Rome wasn’t a novel idea, however.

Among the urban development plans for the city is the particularly important Master Plan of 1909 [4], which conceived of a city whose boundaries exceeded the Aurelian Walls. The plan included the creation of a ring road around the city which hypothetically would set the boundaries for the city’s urban growth. The idea was for the road to allow an alternative to traversing the historical center while facilitating access to the new outer neighborhoods.

During the Fascist government, the Master Plan for 1931 outlined a vision for the city as directed by Mussolini when he expressed the need "to create, adjacent to the ancient and the medieval...the monumental Rome of the twentieth century.” Part of that plan included an amplified ring road, and both Master Plans were precursors to the GRA. The period between 2003 and 2006 saw a new idea come to light, to be known as the Nuova Infrastruttura Anulare, which would have been an even larger ring road that would coexist with the GRA. Due to strong environmental protest, based on the fact that it would run through five conservation areas made up of parks and natural reserves, the NIA was never realized [5].

Rome today

Rome is unique in that it has the largest municipal boundaries in Europe, at 13 times that of Paris proper, making it difficult to plan for. The city’s latest Master Plan, from 2008, looks at making a “city of cities”, tying together the urban fabric with buildings, open spaces and enhancement areas [7]. It also aims to balance land use regulations with transport system design in order to preserve natural areas while easing traffic congestion (the latter of which was unsuccessful since Rome is still considered one of the world’s most congested cities).

The blame for the complexity of the city, though, can’t be laid at the feet of the federal government. Italy, though a unitary state, has land use regulations that align with federalist principles where each region possesses autonomy in shaping land use frameworks. Despite this, regions generally align with each other in their approaches.

The four levels of government - national, regional, provincial, and local - share planning responsibilities, with decisions predominantly at the local level, except for provincial restrictions like environmental impact laws [8]. A 1942 law, reflecting Mussolini's unitary administration, centralized planning and introduced zoning in urban environments, but a 1970 law allowed regions to have more autonomy. Further progress in the same direction was made with the 2001 constitutional referendum that decentralized governance, recognizing regional uniqueness.

At 28 centuries, or 10.2 million days old, the city that “wasn’t built in a day” still continues to evolve, and not always in expected ways [9]. Between 2000 and 2022, the foreign population grew from six percent to nearly 14%, while the total population of the city - at 2.8 million - remains rather steady since the 1970s. That said, there is a trend of less births and an ageing population as well as the start of a demographic shift of women outnumbering men and single people outnumbering those who are married.

As for the future, Rome launched a Smart City initiative in 2021, compromising 81 projects which are already in progress [10]. The plan includes improvements in security, economic development, cultural participation, urban transformation, tourism, education and schools, social aspects, energy, environment, and mobility. Of course, “smart” merely means that all aspects of life will be tracked and traced, so the Latin phrase Qui bono? (who benefits?) is apropos in this instance.

With the growth of the city’s metro region - currently at over four million inhabitants - perhaps the natural evolution of the city is to be multipolar. Something along the lines of what Mussolini started with the EUR project, Rome’s first planned urban core outside the city center [11]. Formally known as the Esposizione Universale Roma, it was set to host the 1942 World’s Fair but was delayed by the large undertaking of draining the marshlands south of the city, and by the onset of WWII (which also led to the cancellation of the World’s Fair). Eventually, the EUR project was finished, but in a paired-down fashion compared to what it might have been.

For a multipolar Rome to work, the metro system would have to continue to expand outwards - though that doesn’t seem to be an issue - and, in the least, the problem of food deserts [12] would have to be resolved. Other main hurdles to be overcome are a lack of good governance, the slow pace of urban renewal, and a need for the recognition of Rome’s metropolitan status as a means of integrating planning and development strategies [13].

Should Rome aspire to retain its timeless legacy, Roma Capitale - the governing body that administers the city - will not only need a visionary at its head but a way to listen to the concerns of those that live there. With complex bureaucracies, of the type that Italians are used to, it’s a situation where there’s troppi galli nel pollaio (too many roosters in the chicken coop). And if one looks to the past as inspiration for how previous problems were solved, Romans might be better off finding some modern-day augurs to interpret bird signs.

If interested in how Paris came to be the capital, read my article here.

Additional Information

1 - Sacro GRA (documentary trailer)

Sources

1 - How was Rome founded? Not in a day, and not by twins

2 - Pomerium (Wikipedia)

3 - The Governance of Land Use in Italy

4 - Formazione della città industriale - XIX secolo

5 - L'ANAS vuole un secondo Raccordo Anulare

6 - Il centro si spopola, le periferie e l’hinterland crescono

7 - Il pgr ‘08 e il ruolo della storia

8 - EU division of powers - Italy

9 - Roma è una città che invecchia, ma gli stranieri ci salveranno

10 - Rome launches its plan to become a "smart city"

11 - 1942 World's Fair: Construction of E.U.R.

12 - Osservatorio Insicurezza e Povertà Alimentare

13 - La futura urbanistica di Roma: Alcuni temi

Ten minutes by boat from the famous Piazza San Marco in Venice lies the small island of San Servolo [1]. Known first and foremost as a Benedictine monastery and later as an asylum for the insane, the island has played many roles.

It’s hard to imagine that the city of picturesque canals and gondolas, known for centuries as the Serenissima, or the Most Serene, would also be home to a place that evokes an opposing sensation. The asylum - which gave birth to the name isola dei matti, or island of crazies - was a fixture of Venice for around 250 years. The history of isolation and its connection to the city, however, are centuries in the making.

Isolation by any other name

The idea of isolating undesired people on an island wasn’t a novel one, as the word ghetto comes from the Venetian ghèto, due to the world’s first Jewish ghetto existing in 1500’s Venice. In fact, even the word “quarantine” comes from the Venetian language, where it referred to a 40-day isolation period for the passengers and crew of ships going to Venice during the Black Death. The initial term was trentino, referring to a month-long isolation but it was later extended to 40 days. These locations of isolation became known as lazarets and the very first one was Venetian.

The forty-day quarantine proved to be an effective formula for handling outbreaks of the plague. According to current estimates, the bubonic plague had a 37-day period from infection to death; therefore, the European quarantines would have been highly successful in determining the health of crews from potential trading and supply ships [2].

Regarding how many were “isolated” on the island of San Servolo over the centuries, estimates have proven hard to come by, but one English-language travel site puts the number at over 200,000. An Italian book on the history of poor and unwell citizens of Venice puts the number - at least during a 70-year period following the opening of the asylum - at around 600, as can be seen in the translated table below.

Some reasons for admission led to short stays. For example, pellagra, which comes from a severe lack of vitamin B3, was the main cause of the mental imbalance of many inpatients, and merely eating more regularly was enough to heal them.

Between its existence as a monastery and an asylum - and a decade before the sanatorium was created - a military hospital existed in its place, due to the continuing war against the Turks. In 1725 the hospital opened to Venetian nobility after a wealthy, mentally-ill man who requested care was granted a space there in exchange for payment.

Previously, the mentally ill would have ended up either in jail or otherwise isolated from society. Those who were unlucky enough to be both poor and mentally unwell (or just incarcerated) eventually ended up in a fusta, a disarmed and dilapidated ship anchored in front of the Palazzo Ducale. It was only in 1797 that the asylum opened to all patients and by the end of 1808, the military hospital was officially transferred to the city, leaving only the asylum in its place.

For two and a half centuries, the sanatorium at San Servolo would serve the mentally-ill. At the turn of the 20th century, change would come - slowly then all at once - to the Italian health system, causing the doors of the asylum to officially close.

Political Solutions

In 1904, the Giolitti Law came into effect, as a means of better defining and streamlining rules around patient admissions and releases. Unfortunately, the law was more about protecting society and did little to advocate for patient rights and living conditions. But that would change some 70 years later.

In 1978, the Italian government started reforming its entire psychiatric system, under the Basaglia Law, named after the main supporter of the reform, Venetian psychiatrist Franco Basaglia.

[The law] contained directives for the closing down of all psychiatric hospitals and led to their gradual replacement with a whole range of community-based services, including settings for acute in-patient care [4].

Regrettably, mental hospitals for the incarcerated did not fall under the statute, as Basaglia’s crusade was more centered around health than it was justice. Known as OPGs, these judicial psychiatric hospitals were to be replaced with REMs (Residence for the execution of security measures) as a more patient-friendly alternative. While many changes took place due to the Basaglia Law - and many other countries looked to Italy’s reforms to model their own systematic overhauls - the official closure of OPGs in Italy only took place in March 2015. Even that date wasn’t held to, as several months following that date, not all OPGs had become REMs [5, 6].

Other Roles

As for the island, from 1978 to the 1990s, its structures were left in total abandon until a government decree led to its restoration. In 2004, the government created an institution to protect and manage the island, and it has led to one of Venice’s most beautiful little islands being utilized in a handful of ways, to the point that between 120 to 150 events take place there annually.

Another important permanent cultural attraction is linked to VID, Venice Innovation Design. Established at the site of a Benedictine convent, San Servolo has also hosted several National Pavilions of Biennale of Art and Architecture for over a decade, various collateral events, temporary exhibitions of photography, painting and sculpture, music festivals and video presentations [7]

One of the island’s principal attractions since its redevelopment, however, is its museum. In 2006, a wing of the former convent was transformed into a museum of the insane, showing how the mentally unstable were medically treated during nearly three centuries.

[The museum] is divided into nine sections: the Laboratory, the Ambulatory, Didactic Products, Sickness Therapies, Straightjackets, the Sick, Lodgings, Pharmacy, and Anatomical Theater. The archives hold photo albums of patients from 1874 through to the 20th century... [8]

The photo albums include comparisons of the patients, as they were when they entered, and later left, the asylum, as shown below. The archives also hold the testimonies of the therapies which patients undertook, daily.

The island - showing its place in the collective memory of Venice - is still sometimes referred to as the isola dei matti today. So much so that, at one point, the asylum’s fame apparently gave rise to the phrase, se non fai il bravo ti mando a San Servolo (if you aren’t good, I’ll send you to San Servolo). Whether being sent there is a good or bad thing depends entirely on which version of the island is being discussed: the convent, the hospital and asylum, or the place of learning and culture that it has become today. One thing is for sure, San Servolo has always been a place of before & afters, of salvation and transformation.

Additional Information

1 - The current area the island takes up is almost 10 times larger than its original size due to man-made territorial expansion.

Recommendations

The film La Pazza Gioia (aka, Like Crazy) is about women who were former patients of a sanatorium, and now living in a CSM (or, Mental Health Center). Also recommended, Si Può Fare (aka, We Can Do That), a drama about a co-living collective in the early 1980s, set up to deal with the former patients of mental hospitals.

Sources

2 - A Brief History of Quarantine

3 - Per la salute di que’ poveri infermi: Tre secoli di hospitalità dei Fatebenefratelli a Venezia

4 - Basaglia Law

5 - L’Unione delle Camere Penali Italiane all’attacco: «Riforma degli Opg mai partita»

6 - Dalla Basaglia alle R.E.M.S.:  l’evoluzione normativa e culturale del sistema di assistenza al paziente psichiatrico-forense

7 - Un mondo in un'isola: San Servolo

8 - San Servolo Insane Asylum Museum

9 - Gli ospedali di S. Servolo (official site, English)

10 - San Servolo, Venezia. Da luogo di segregazione a isola polifunzionale