THE CITY of the MAD and the CITY of the DEAD

Human existence, in fact, until the second half of the fifteenth century and beyond, is dominated by the looming presence of death; and the end of time takes on the appearance of plagues and wars. It is an order that no one escapes, yet in the final years of the century, this great restlessness is transformed: the derision of madness takes the place of death and its seriousness. "From the discovery of that necessity that fatally reduced man to nothing, we moved on to the contemptuous contemplation of this nothingness, which is existence itself". Madness is the advance of death, specifies Foucault, but it is also its vanquished presence, since announcing in these daily clues that it already reigns, those same clues indicate that its prey will be a meagre booty: the head that will be skull is already empty. What we find in the madman's laughter is that he laughs in advance of the laughter of death, and the senseless, presaging the macabre, has disarmed him. The substitution of the theme of madness for that of death therefore does not mark a break but rather a twist within the same uneasiness / itself. We will find this relationship between death and madness in different forms later on and, as we will see later, even the places destined to host them will share a relationship that at the same time unites and contrasts them. On the threshold of the nineteenth century, people thought that the soul could fall ill and thus required a doctor of the soul, for which psychiatry was born and with it the medicalization (iatric) of the soul. We are in an era of general change that, of course, does not only affect the way we relate to mental illness but in the second half of the nineteenth century, even in Italy, together with the radical urban changes that will give a new structure to the main centres of the country, the "city of the dead" was born and later developed. In any case, the "city of the dead" and the "city of fools", although both referable to the concept of "closed city", represent two objectively distinct realities, which cannot be compared to each other except in strictly philosophical terms (the physical and social death).