Tour inside Italy’s infamous abandoned hospitals
This is Part 1 of a series of posts about our two-week journey across Italy to visit abandoned villas, hospitals, churches and other strange places in October 2021. Part 1 focuses on abandoned hospitals we visited during the trip. More photos are published on Abandoned Nordic’s Instagram page.
Wet shoes and silence
I find myself reading a medical referral form in complete silence. It says ‘Urgent’ in Italian, which feels amusing because this place has been stuck in time for decades. The typography of this old, blank form is beautiful and one can easily see that this kind of elegance in such a dull piece of administrative process is something that has vanished from modern life. The fragile paper form, roughly the size of a paperback book cover, is over fifty years old and covered in dust. The form is blank, and many similar ones are lying around on the floor next to some wet boxes filled with medical records. Why am I holding this piece of paper in my hand? I’m inside an abandoned psychiatric hospital somewhere in Italy and I shouldn’t be here. I have to confess that this isn’t my first time inside such a place, nor will it be the last.
It is October and my shoes are wet because of the morning dew. Entering an abandoned psychiatric hospital requires usually circling around the building to find a collapsed part of a wall or a hole in a fence. Since they are abandoned, vegetation can grow wild around the perimeter leaving tall grass, fallen branches and spiky plants to guard the area. This might give the impression that these places are somewhere far away from urban life, but they’re not. They are just hiding in plain sight, behind active properties or walls we don’t usually pay any attention to.
Why are there so many abandoned psychiatric hospitals in Italy? One of the main reasons is the Basaglia Law or Law 180, which in 1978 clearly aimed to close down all psychiatric hospitals in Italy. According to a research article the act was a part of a social movement for expanding civil and social rights (Mezzina, 2018). This paradigm shift in psychiatric care was happening in many countries and urban explorers around the world have surely come across a multitude of abandoned psychiatric hospitals, and Italy is no exception.
Inside ‘Manicomio di V’ I stand in complete silence. It’s refreshing to feel a bit uncomfortable because of the fact that we shouldn’t be here, and also because of my wet feet. This is something that people ‘normally’ wouldn’t feel refreshing, but I guess no one can really tell before they’ve tried sneaking into abandoned buildings. Silence makes us all hear a lot further and I can hear how my two companions walk across the odd rooms. I hear how they stop to adjust their cameras to take a photograph of an abandoned hospital room with gloomy looking medical equipment. We’ve all seen photos of abandoned places and this is how the photos are taken. Photographs we, and many others, have posted on social media give a much more detailed image of how these places look like. So — there is no point in describing all the moldy rooms and strange details we’ve encountered so far, but there is a lot more to it.
On our route map, we have at least ten abandoned hospitals. The idea is not to visit every single one, but to adjust our route so we don’t end up driving too much during daylight hours. Also, there is no telling which of these places we actually manage to enter. Today, we succeeded. The area is enormous and has many abandoned buildings but there’s a catch. Some of the buildings are not abandoned and are actually very active. We have to sneak across the area carefully to avoid being seen. Sounds fun, right? We’ve done our homework and know which abandoned buildings are interesting from inside. We don’t want to waste time by entering empty buildings, especially when they are close to the active ones. Our goal is to enter, take photographs and exit the area without no one knowing we were ever there. Urban exploration is borderline-criminal, but our intentions are good and we don’t want to cause any trouble.
Big trees and memories
Couple days before, we’d successfully entered one of the most iconic abandoned hospitals in Italy, a place called ‘Manicomio di R’. Me, Tanja and Niko all have seen countless photos from this place. Although we felt like urban exploration tourists, seeing photos and experiencing the place personally are two different things. Also, there is no telling how long this building will be there for people like us to visit it. A cliche warning: it’s a race against time. We reach the main building, where there are two inner wards — huge patios within the main building. The trees growing there looked something out of this world. They have grown naturally to all different directions without someone in blue overalls clipping them regularly. The trunks are huge and some of the vegetation have even made their way inside the surrounding hallways through windows and cracks in the walls. This place looked like something from a scifi-movie.
Tanja and Niko start to unpack their photography gear. It was time to turn our attention from the general atmosphere to individual rooms. For them, being in every interesting room takes a while, so I continue walking the corridors by myself. I hear people talking and I wonder whether we are alone. The sounds are distant and I don’t hear any footsteps. After a while I understand that we are actually very close to an active street where people walk and go on with their everyday lives, probably not giving any thought for this old building. Here, on the other side of a wall, is a dusty dimension with medical gear from the 60s, and three persons trespassing.
For the past few hours, we have seen crumbling corridors, collapsed floors, rooms filled with old medical instruments and patient records (picture). The thing with these big hospitals is that you can never know which kind of room comes next and were not on some guided tour with flip-flops and sign-posts. Old Italian hospitals tend to have them all — wards, laboratories, operating rooms, churches, you name it. You get overwhelmed by it all and it would require many visits to get the complete picture.
We’ve seen enough for now and decide to head towards our entry point. The amount of fallen leaves on the old pavement reminds us that we are still inside an abandoned area. Maintenance isn’t included in the price. When approaching the entry point, we see some people just outside the area. They don’t seem to be moving, just standing next to the spot where we entered. This corner is far from active streets and we become a little bit suspicious. Why are they there, who are they? Waiting a while doesn’t change the situation and we decide to exit. They turn out to be a couple, and the guy used to run around and play inside the hospital when he was just a kid. His father worked there. We show them some fresh photographs from inside. He recognizes some of the spots and starts to tell us some childhood memories in Italian. Miscusi, but we don’t speak your language, we tell them. They don’t have the guts to enter the area.
Red light
Another day, another madhouse, this one is called Manicomio di VG. It has a dark history, which is not uncommon for psychiatric hospitals. This kind of visit is only about the surface and we don’t have the time to investigate the history and weird events which took place here.
Inside, we find small tricycles and a classroom, also old wheelchairs and hospital beds. We locate the ‘Rotunda’-shaped ward which resembles a prison. Me and Niko are whispering, looking at a small white box on the wall, perhaps ten or fifteen meters in front of us. Under the white box there is a door and on the box a red light, which means that there is electricity, which again means there might be alarms or sensors inside. We decided to stay on the part of the hospital we have been safely exploring so far. We understand that there is some activity on the other side of the hospital area. It would be awkward to step inside an active hospital — our black dusty clothes and gear would make it hard to blend in. I’m wondering if there are moments when a doctor or a nurse accidentally enters this old abandoned side with broken windows, green walls, half of the tiles missing and thinks ‘oops, wrong door’.
Conclusions, so far
After two weeks, we have visited many more abandoned hospitals — Manicomios. Photographs have a hard time describing the dimensions of these buildings. They are vast in every direction. I felt small being inside a large hospital, located within a huge area, looking at the ceiling high above me. Here everything is loaded with the pressure of years, stories and history which I cannot comprehend. Seeing many abandoned hospitals gives us some impressions of the buildings in general, their architecture and feeling, but we don’t have the possibility to delve into one in particular. We tend to turn blind eye to the history and reasons why these hospitals have been abandoned, and instead focus on photography. We are not documentarians or historians. We want to experience these buildings where the clocks have stopped and capture their strange afterglow on photographs, before it’s too late.
References:
Mezzina, R. (2018) Forty years of the Law 180: the aspirations of a great reform, its successes and continuing need. Epidemiol Psychiatr Sci. 2018 Aug; 27(4): 336–345.
