The Real Madhouse of Palermo and the Literary Myth of the Baron Pisani

Abstract

  This story is about a government, which considered the management of madness not a medical issue but a matter of law and order, and a 64 years old official who became the director of a madhouse having no medical nor managing expertise in mental disease, but just humanity and dedication. But most of all it’s the story of their attempt to project an image of themselves and of what they had done, that turned out in something completely different: a literary myth which went so far to reach the pen of Alexandre Dumas and Edgar Allan Poe.