Every Sunday at 10 you can visit this former asylum to understand all the drama of psychiatric hospitals

The institution that marked a city

In Volterra, in the heart of Tuscany, there is a place that still weighs as an open wound today. The former psychiatric hospital, born in 1888 within the former convent of San Girolamo, became a real closed citadel in a few decades, with pavilions, workshops, cultivated fields, workshops and even a bakery.

It was not just a hospital: it was a self -sufficient village built to contain, rather than to cure. Under the direction of Luigi Scabia, from 1900 to 1934, the Institute widened dramatically, coming to host thousands of people. Ergotherapy was officially practiced, work as therapy, and the so-called “no-resotraint”, which limited physical containments. But behind these modern principles the harsh reality survived: closed departments, isolation, rigid hierarchies and confined lives away from any external gaze.

Daily life and forced silences

Whoever entered Volterra rarely came out of it. The hospitalized spent the days divided by pavilions, sometimes working in the fields, others in the workshop or in the laundry. For many, the routine was made of endless corridors, closed doors, inflexible rules. There were parties, theatrical performances, even musical activities, but limited episodes remained within a system that had the main objective of the custody. The hospital thus transformed into a separate, invisible community, in which thousands of men and women lived a suspended life, more similar to a condemnation than to a cure.

The Livi pavilion

The Livi pavilion was built between 1909 and 1911 and completed in 1914, during the direction of Luigi Scabia. In the following years he suffered several interventions: in 1934 he was raised and expanded, in 1958 the rooms for the nuns were created that served it, and in 1960 the heating system was installed. In the end it took on the definitive shape of a three -storey building, with a C plant, built in stone masonry and brick, like many other pavilions of the complex.

The name pays homage to Carlo Livi, a Prato doctor active in the second half of the nineteenth century, pioneer of Italian psychiatry. The department was intended from the beginning to women patients voluntarily hospitalized, and not to those subjected to forced internment. The stay was therefore temporary, often linked to acute crises or moments of fragility that needed observation.

Compared to other hardest pavilions, such as Biffi or Ramazzini, Livi represented a less oppressive place. The degents could move with relative freedom, deal with manual activities in internal social centers – from embroidery to painting – or even making small purchases with their subsidies at the dealing of the asylum. Some accompanied the operators on the commissions outside, thus living a daily life that, although controlled, returned a margin of autonomy and dignity.

The testimonies of the nurse who worked there in recent years describe Livi as a “beautiful repartino”: not too crowded, with patients largely self -sufficient and others in the process of healing. The women who managed to regain mental stability spent the hospitalization almost like a period of serene convalescence. They told the nurse stories of their family and their lives, often leaving the most painful memories of the acute phase of the disease in the shade.

The Livi pavilion thus remains the symbol of a less hard and more human approach than other sections of the psychiatric hospital: a department that, despite the walls of the asylum, tried to preserve spaces of freedom, creativity and hope.

The art of Nof4 and the wall that still speaks

The most powerful symbol of Volterra’s asylum remains the involuntary work of Fernando Nannetti, known as Nof4. Internated in the Ferri judicial pavilion since 1958, he recorded with the buckle of the uniform thousands of words and drawings on the external walls of the department. Those written, still visible, are news and vision together: life fragments, cosmic imaginations, messages that scratch silence. Nof4 graffiti is now considered one of the most extraordinary testimonies of “Art Brut” in Europe. It is the sign of how, in a context of deprivation, art could become resistance and survival.

The closure with the Basaglia law

1978 marks the turning point. With law 180, which decreed the closure of all Italian asylums, Volterra also closed the gates. Some patients were transferred to smaller structures or to family homes, others remained in a land of anyone for a long time, suspended between past and future. The large citadel of madness gradually emptied, leaving behind dilapidated buildings and difficult memories to elaborate.

Today between abandonment and memory

Today the former asylum of Volterra is a place suspended between degradation and recovery. The abandoned pavilions, with broken roofs and broken windows, transmit a disturbing charm that attracts curious and passionate of Urban Exploration. But it’s not just a decadent scenario. Inside the complex there is a museum that collects strength shirts, photographs, medical equipment, busts and documents. It is the most lively part of the memory project, which allows those who visit to understand what it meant to be interned there. Every Sunday, guided tours accompany visitors between the remains of the pavilions and the scratch of Nof4, making a story tangible that would otherwise risk falling into oblivion.

What you will see during the guided tours of the asylum of Volterra

The guided visits to the asylum of Volterra take place every Sunday at 10:00, only by reservation, in groups accompanied by professional guides. The cost is 20 euros per person, free for minors of 14 years and for the residents of the Municipality.

The route crosses the tree-lined avenues of the former psychiatric complex, now partly used for hospital functions, and runs alongside the main historical pavilions: Tebaldi, Zani, Claude Bernard, Kraepelin, San Girolamo, Mendel, Scabia, Canestrini, Mascagni, Zacchia, Golgi, Verga, in addition to the cinema-theater and the suggestive “Pagoda”.

It is not allowed to enter the pavilions or access the non -accessible areas, such as the Lombroso Museum or the graffiti of Nannetti. But the value of the experience lies precisely in the alternation between what is seen and what remains invisible, entrusted to the words of the guides and the silence of the places.

During the visit, vintage photographs, authentic stories and testimonies will emerge, which return fragments of everyday life and show the signs still present in architecture. It is not a simple tourist walk: it is a journey into memory, a way to hear, imagine and remember what it meant to live in a city-man’s city.

Why return to Volterra

Visiting the former asylum is not a light experience. You don’t go out of morbid curiosity, but to look at the story. The walls still speak: they tell of interrupted lives, of a psychiatry that he wanted to cure but often ended up imprisoning, of a past that cannot be forgotten. Where before there was a asylum there is now a place of living memory, capable of making you think about the subtle border between care and control, between dignity and deprivation.

On the same topic: