Museo Laboratorio della Mente

The Museo Laboratorio della Mente which opened in 2000, follows the history of the Santa Maria della Pietà hospital complex in Rome from its founding as a hospital for poor foreigners and the insane, until its closing as a mental hospital 500 years later. The hospital’s history is a journey through the history of mental institutions, a story of hardship and diversity, of the fight against the stigma of mental illness and for the promotion of mental health.

The layout of the museum is based on an “historical map” – which also makes use of oral sources and materials from the Cencelli Library and the historical archive of Santa Maria della Pietà – of institutional and anti-institutional practices, like a continuous, two-fold dialectical process that on the one hand deconstructs the geography of spatial, physical, psychological and social constructions, and on the other reconstructs the individual subjectivity.