The “Sante Zennaro” Medical and Psycho-Pedagogical Institute of Imola: History of the small revolution that anticipated the law 180/1978 by five years

Abstract

Imola is known for having hosted psychiatric institutions since the mid-nineteenth century. Historians have so far focused in particular on the environmental and social context which initially gave rise to the establishment of a small psychiatric asylum, then the realization of a great ambitious project by the doctor Luigi Lolli’s will, finally the construction of the Observance compound on the initiative of the Charity Congregation of Imola at the end of the nineteenth century. No specific research study has so far been carried out on the realities of children and young people admitted to psychiatric hospitals in the Imola area, but it is known that recovery trials were started at the beginning of the twentieth century, about which there are printed scientific reports.

The decisive turning point for the creation of an institution for children with mental problems by the

province of Bologna (to which the Lolli hospital in Imola belonged) was represented by the consequences of the Second World War. The concentration in Imola of numerous children displaced from Bologna gave rise in 1949 to the setting up of a dedicated pavilion inside the Lolli hospital, named Psychopedagogical Institute; in 1956 it was then entitled to Sante Zennaro, a young man who had lost his life to save children victims of a kidnapping. The Sante Zennaro Institute, despite several changes of location, remained in operation until 1972, when it was closed, anticipating the entry into force of the Basaglia law by several years. The trigger for this controversial decision was provided by the psychiatrist Eustachio Loperfido who, intercepting the new ways of approaching mental illness, activated a series of experiments for the inclusion of children within the social context, making the concept of isolation definitively obsolete as represented by the institute.