Letizia Battaglia tells the rich humanity of the madmen

"The madmen, a rich and exciting humanity ...". Word of Letizia Battaglia, the great photographer who at the end of the seventies documented the mentally ill of the asylum in Palermo by opening a gash on a hidden world that only the 1978 law inspired by Franco Basaglia managed to free from secular isolation and denial. The artist, pink hair and 84 years old brought with extraordinary energy and lucidity, told the unrepeatable season of political struggles and tensions, passions and social commitment to the public that crowded Palazzo Merulana for a meeting dedicated precisely to the asylums 40 years after his death of the Venetian psychiatrist.
"I entered the asylum because I was attracted to madness - he says - I knew that the Basaglia law had been approved a year or two earlier but the asylums were still open. The intent was not the photo, I was attracted to life and that very closed world .
At the beginning they did not want to be photographed, they were ashamed, but playing the pimp and the stupid ... "Those years among the mentally ill were marked by normal contacts, ball games, cinema, theater, small things. Letizia Battaglia, who all he worked at the newspaper "L 'Ora", ran away from the editorial office during the lunch break and every day spent two hours of his time in the Real Casa dei Matti in via Pindemonte. "Of the many photos I took there, only about thirty are good "he explains. The Czech colleague Josef Koudelka, author of the historical report on the late spring of Prague and the Soviet invasion with tanks in the center of the city, managed to convince the Sicilian asylum.
"He shot a lot too, but he didn't show anything," he says with regret.
The memories of Letizia Battaglia bring out many dramatic stories. Graziella, for example, entered a mental hospital at the age of four. "When I met her, she was 22 years old. She had become schizophrenic, I convinced her to come to our house but she didn't stay long. 'I want to be sick all my life, I want to go back to the asylum', she said. It was a failure, a failure and a Or that of Fara, taken to a mental hospital at 15 because a parish priest had made her pregnant: the boy ended up in an orphanage but the priest kept the job. "Fara kept her dearest things under the mattress because she didn't there were lockers. One day the nun cleaned up and threw it all away and she died of a broken heart. We organized a funeral for her by singing and dancing around her coffin. "It was also possible to smile, however." Once we brought a group of punks and looking at their clothing and their way of doing the sick commented 'these are crazy'. In a video there was also my daughter whom I had shaved to zero: she was crazy, the sick in the asylum the normal. We were happy. "
"I have always photographed the sick with respect as I did for the mobsters. I was never afraid of madness. That was one of the most stimulating periods of my life," says Letizia Battaglia today. Next to her, in the meeting organized by Palazzo Merulana with Collective, there was Goffredo Fofi, journalist and essayist, friend of the photographer and like her engaged in many battles of those years. He talks about asylums as "a tragedy that we should all feel ashamed of", referring to the people who have been imprisoned by family members for inheritance issues, to husbands who got rid of their wives in this way, to those forced to enter the mental hospital really from mental illness. "We have to start again from Basaglia - he says -. Italy was the first country in the world to close the asylums, then we gradually lost ground. We have to fight, with the fight something is achieved, otherwise nothing can change. Then there is he was a left ... Christian Democrats and Communists, although with different paths and motivations, had in common the desire to intervene on social issues ".
"I was terrified of the mentally ill, they made me uncomfortable. Letizia instead, no. She is a woman, she is a little crazy.
She has a vitality, a generosity, an affectivity not only towards the mad, but towards the children, the killed dead ". In weaving the praise of the photographer Fofi defines her" not only an artist, but a great militant. It 's too much ... .Litizia is too much ". (ANSA).