Our research aims to demonstrate the possibility of making the precincts devoted to therapeutic isolation (today mostly abandoned and awaiting new identities), inherited from 19th-century cities, interact fruitfully with the emerging demand for new spaces for personal care, as today it is interpreted in the disciplinary fields of psychotherapy and the social and anthropological sciences.
The thrust of our research lies in examining the vast disused structures present in the Region of Latium, such as asylums, sanatoriums, etc., featuring vast open spaces that today have accrued significant ecological and historical-landscape interest.
Despite the few partial recoveries that have gotten under way, numerous obstacles seem to be impeding the formation of new functional identities and collective identifications: the vastness of the complexes, the typological characterization of buildings and green spaces, the images and imaginaries connected to the painful isolation of the past, as is evident in the former psychiatric hospitals of Santa Maria della Pietà in Rome, San Francesco in Rieti and Belcolle in Viterbo, and in the former Forlanini sanatorium in Rome.
This research, in accord with some programs of the Health Departments, aims to verify the possibilities of transforming these spaces, once devoted to therapeutic isolation, into Parks for relational therapy, with reference to the projects, three major research topics:
(a) spaces favoring the autonomy of persons for developing socio-work skills;
(b) spaces able to encourage new lifestyles through "experiential paths" of well-being and psycho-physical equilibrium, especially in regard to food education and exercise;
(c) spaces transformable into Landscapes of curative relationships, possible "transitional objects", in their most advanced contemporary developments (Mindscapes), for treating mental illnesses by transforming abandoned landscapes into new vital landscapes of the mind.
