z2o Sara Zanin is pleased to announce the participation of Silvia Camporesi in Manicomi italici, at the Museo Civici Reggio Emilia.
The Civic Museums of Reggio Emilia present, at the Museum of the History of Psychiatry, the first public restitution of Italian Asylums , the project by Silvia Camporesi and Luca Marianaccio.Promoted by the Civic Museums of the Municipality of Reggio Emilia in collaboration with AUSL RE, the exhibition opened on Sunday, September 27 at 4:30 pm as part of Mental Health Week.The exhibition brings together a selection of twenty photographs —ten by each author—from a corpus of over one hundred images created during the course of the research and compiled in the volume Manicomi italici ( Quodlibet, 2026), which will be presented during the exhibition.
The project stems from a photographic survey of abandoned and/or redeveloped former mental hospitals, conducted by Silvia Camporesi and Luca Marianaccio across the entire country, with at least one site documented for each region. The investigation spans a diverse architectural heritage—ancient convents, noble villas, fortresses, agricultural colonies, and monumental buildings—which, following the closure of psychiatric hospitals under the Basaglia Law, have experienced divergent trajectories: from abandonment to reuse, from ruin to repurposing. These are presences that, however, the country's urban and peri-urban landscape has not yet fully metabolized.
"The project," writes Cesare Pomarici, "documents a representative selection of these complexes, capturing their physical presence, architecture, and relationship with the surrounding landscape. The images do more than simply provide testimony: they interrogate the space, reveal its transformations in use since its closure, and bring to light a collective memory that remains unresolved. In the background is the question that Franco Basaglia and his collaborators raised, a question that remains highly relevant today: mental health as a social, cultural, and community issue."
Information:
Manicomi italici | from September 27, 2026 to January 6, 2027
Museum of the History of Psychiatry
Via Amendola, 2 – Reggio Emilia
Opening hours:
Saturday and Sunday, 3:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Free admission.
For more information, click here.
