ABSTRACT
This chapter establishes the importance of accounting in managing the insane in the Real Casa dei Matti, the Royal House of Madness, a renowned lunatic asylum which was founded in the city of Palermo, Sicily, in the early 19th century at the dawn of modern psychiatry. Accounting provided the means to legitimate the role played by lunatic asylums in post-Napoleonic society and was a tool to mediate with the public authorities to provide the resources necessary to care for the insane and restore them to society.
