This is another trip in memory of those who now Nardini has accustomed us, through the wilds of the asylum, that structure once so powerful and almost afraid to strike today so gentle. The camera traces and investigates abandoned through the long corridors, large halls, the cells stained and the bathrooms devastated, traces of lives lived on the margins, where the line between normalcy and madness becomes really thin.
Nearly thirty years after the law Basaglia, who had denounced the asylums closed in some way the conditions they lived in the mentally ill and nearly ten years after the resignation of the last patients, the structure, now abandoned, prey to vandals, remains almost haughty monumental. Monastery first, then converted into a hospital, Maggiano stands on a hill near Lucca, and has been celebrated and made famous by the books of writer Mario Tobino that here was psychiatrist and lived in his rooms in the hospital, most part of his life, “because it can be known only within the madness.”
Nardini, with awe and respect, came into this place of pain and suffering. Today no longer feel screams and ravings, you do not see the nudity or the gestures of someone who is not able to choose from, but all around there talking, makes us reconsider memorable characters described by Tobin. The power of images, the powerful black and white shooting with a strong evocative power and the viewer can not help but be caught by this atmosphere, the light and dark, the lights and shadows seem to fully reproduce the alternation of moments of “lucid madness”. Nardini says in his introduction: “There were more crazy, but everything was telling me about them, that mysterious god who lived in them, I photographed the darkness of grief, madness, I threw in the light of photography in the remains lives, fleeting signs that the time left. ”
This photographic tour attempts to penetrate the silence and give voice to those who have no words, to grasp how Tobino says that “mysterious and divine manifestation of man” which is madness.

The work is composed of about fifty images of fourteen enlargements were printed in the study Paolo Valli, printer of fine art, of Massarosa.

The exhibition, under the auspices of the Fondazione Mario Tobino, will remain open until 21 February in Villa Paolina, Via Machiavelli 2, Viareggio.

Hours:
every day except Monday 16-19 hours

For more information:
Comune di Viareggio
Phone: 0584 961076 – 0584 966338
Website: www.comune.viareggio.lu.it