ABSTRACT
Historical accounts of the asylums in the various states of pre-unified Italy have attracted considerable interest, and much research has been and is being carried out in the archives of major psychiatric institutions to investigate the huge heritage of original documents. By the mid-nineteenth century the blueprint of psychiatric institutions had been effectively drawn; every Italian state had its lunatic asylums and physicians to supervise them. But it is only in the second half of the century, with the emergence of the new Italian state that a ‘national consciousness’ of psychiatry as an autonomous discipline with a distinct professional identity was born. The fortunes of Italian psychiatry, at both national and international levels, were undoubtedly linked to the encounter of psychiatry with the spread of positivism: an encounter of which Cesare Lombroso, with his criminal anthropology, provides the most famous instance.
