Alda Merini: The Choice of Madness, the Rescue of the Word Alda Merini’s early vocation to poetry produced a twofold clash with society: as a woman and as a poet. Madness was for her both a choice of otherness (as the choice of living homeless) and diagnosis: a sentence by society to her disadvantage. Through and notwithstanding the experience of mental illness, of imprisonment in a psychiatric hospital, and of the consequent stigma, Alda Merini was able to build up her identity. Against the power mechanisms of psychiatry and against social exclusion, she grabbed the sword of writing. Thanks to writing (which is therapy and singing) Alda Merini did not let the hell experience of the psychiatric hospital and the stigma of illness overcome her. She was able, in this way, to realize her vocation as woman and poet. Key words: poetry, madness, woman, vocation, identity.
Crossing borders: between literature and science – Italian culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has offered significant examples of renewal through crossing boundaries between different disciplines. Several writers (Levi, Calvino, Gadda, Sinisgalli, Del Giudice, Giordano, Arpaia, Odifreddi) have overcome the dichotomy between the two cultures that was denounced by Charles Snow in 1959. Sixty years after the famous essay by Snow, the paper will show several examples of connections between literature and science, by using the concept of the “four frontier customs”: “the transit”, “the trespass”, “the alliance”, and “the conflict”.
The aim of the article is to compare the reform and the narration of the psychiatric environment in the work of Franco Basaglia and Mario Tobino from an ecological perspective. Both psychiatrists worked to reform the asylum spaces and the therapeutic relationships within it. Their actions and their narrations were both ecological but had an opposite ending. While Tobino defended until the end the idea of a safe psychiatric environment, protected by society, considered dangerous, Franco Basaglia strongly affirmed the repressiveness of the asylum space, the need to dismantle it and return the madness to society.