The hospital was founded in 1548 in central Rome by the Church’s Jesuit Order as a hospital for immigrants and persons with mental illness. It moved in 1725 just across the Tiber River and then again in 1909 to a large rural site. Closed in 1999, the study center and museum opened the following year.

Dr. Martelli, a social psychiatrist with roots in the Italian psychiatry reform movement and the work of Franco Basaglia, has accomplished a fantastic psychiatric resource: a center for study and archives as well as advocacy for mental health recovery. The archives include clinical records for 205,000 persons as well as rare archival documents such as casebooks maintained by the Vatican before Italian unification in the nineteenth century.

The museum, through its exhibits designed by the Italian firm Studio Azzurro, evokes through new information technologies such as interactive video environments the experience of mental illness and the subtleties of control and surveillance employed in manicomios (and by the way many asylums in the USA) during their era. The Museo Laboratorio is participating in a European museum network to promote and support mental health.

The photos here are just a few of the many buildings of the old hospital complex, part of which is a public park.

This alligator was in the section known as the Serapaeum which was used for open air banquets.

My words and pictures here are completely inadequate to describe the magnificent and restorative landscape of Hadrian’s Villa.

In Rome today I was reminded of this by the ornate floors in this marble design in the nave of the basilica Santa Maria in Trastevere.

This afternoon my friend Lynne Lancaster, author of Concrete Vaulted Construction in Imperial Rome, gave me a fabulous introduction to the Pantheon complete with scholarly details. The  deep Imperial Purple stone here, part of a huge circular floor tile in the Pantheon, is porphyry quarried two thousand years ago in Egypt and brought to Rome by boat.

Lynne also introduced me to the gelato combination of chocolate and pistachio, one scoop each!

This spring I took a linoleum block printing class at the Kennedy Museum of Art. Our instructor, printmaker Elizabeth Ferrill, showed us her pen and ink drawings of The Ridges. You can see more of Elizabeth’s work at elizabethferrill.com.

The former living spaces of the asylum superintendent and his family –  second floor in the painting below left –  are now studio and gallery spaces.

The meadows and woods behind Cemetery 2 are great for hiking, and this old forsythia hedge is on Dairy Lane, formerly part of the asylum’s dairy operations.

Last week while hiking on The Ridges I met Will and Robert, from Cleveland, who are finishing up the demolition of Building 26. The wood has already been hauled away, the metal recycled, and the two men are  in Athens to dispatch with the enormous piles of brick, stone, and mortar left from the  project.

Will runs this big blue crusher, filling it first with cubic yard size backhoe buckets of the stone. The crushed material is loaded into a dump truck which Robert drives up  toward Radar Hill and empties  onto the road. We will soon have a newly graveled path there; instead of mud we will be walking on the remains of Building 26.

Will’s daughter has been accepted to Ohio University, among other schools, for the fall and is trying to decide where to go. I told him she is already a Bobcat.

Completed in 1950 as a general hospital for the Athens asylum, the 45,000 square foot building hosted lobotomist Dr. Walter Freeman. Wrote Supt. Fockler in a memo dated 13 December 1956:

We have been doing lobotomies here at Athens for several years and several hundreds of them have been done…the operation is not without risk, therefore, it is not resorted to until other methods of treatment such as ECT, tranquilizing drugs or routine therapy have failed to bring about a cure…Dr. Freeman comes twice a year for a series of operations…The mortality rate from this operation has been given as from two to five per cent. In the last 55 operations we had one death due to fatal hemorrhage.                 (p. 179, Asylum on the Hill: History of a Healing Landscape.)

For more information on Dr. Freeman, see The Lobotomist by Jack El-Hai.

I had wondered whether the little group of deer that stays just below the site would be affected by the commotion: apparently not much. I asked one of the men working on the project whether the deer were still around and he nodded yes and pointed them out. The men have been poking around the area looking for deer antlers, haven’t found any yet.

I have stayed away from the demolition site as asbestos is a factor in the work, but here is a photo from The Post. Read here the latest news, a piece in The Post by Will Drabold on the re-activation of a university advisory committee charged with planning for The Ridges.