The Lunatic Asylum at Palermo.
PALERMO, _June 28_.—Two of the best conducted lunatic asylums in the
world are in the kingdom of Naples—one at Aversa, near Capua, and the
other at Palermo. The latter is managed by a whimsical Sicilian baron,
who has devoted his time and fortune to it, and, with the assistance of
the government, has carried it to great extent and perfection. The poor
are received gratuitously, and those who can afford it enter as
boarders, and are furnished with luxuries according to their means.
The hospital stands in an airy situation in the lovely neighbourhood of
Palermo. We were received by a porter in a respectable livery, who
introduced us immediately to the old baron—a kind-looking man, rather
advanced beyond middle life, of manners singularly genteel and
prepossessing. “_Je suis le premier fou_,” said he, throwing his arms
out, as he bowed on our entrance. We stood in an open court, surrounded
with porticoes lined with stone seats. On one of them lay a fat,
indolent-looking man, in clean gray clothes, talking to himself with
great apparent satisfaction. He smiled at the baron as he passed,
without checking the motion of his lips, and three others standing in
the doorway of a room marked as the kitchen, smiled also as he came up,
and fell into his train, apparently as much interested as ourselves in
the old man’s explanations.
The kitchen was occupied by eight or ten people, all at work, and all,
the baron assured us, _mad_. One man, of about forty, was broiling a
steak with the gravest attention. Another, who had been furious till
employment was given him, was chopping meat with violent industry in a
large wooden bowl. Two or three girls were about, obeying the little
orders of a middle-aged man, occupied with several messes cooking on a
patent stove. I was rather incredulous about his insanity, till he took
a small bucket and went to the jet of a fountain, and getting impatient
from some cause or other, dashed the water upon the floor. The baron
mildly called him by name, and mentioned to him, as a piece of
information, that he had wet the floor. He nodded his head, and filling
his bucket quietly, poured a little into one of the pans, and resumed
his occupation.
We passed from the kitchen into an open court, curiously paved, and
ornamented with Chinese grottoes, artificial rocks, trees, cottages, and
fountains. Within the grottoes reclined figures of wax. Before the altar
of one, fitted up as a Chinese chapel, a mandarin was prostrated in
prayer. The walls on every side were painted in perspective scenery, and
the whole had as little the air of a prison as the open valley itself.
In one of the corners was an unfinished grotto, and a handsome young man
was entirely absorbed in thatching the ceiling with strips of cane. The
baron pointed to him, and said he had been incurable till he had found
this employment for him. Everything about us, too, he assured us, was
the work of his patients. They had paved the court, built the grottoes
and cottages, and painted the walls, under his direction. The secret of
his whole system, he said, was employment and constant kindness. He had
usually about one hundred and fifty patients, and he dismissed upon an
average two-thirds of them quite recovered.
We went into the apartments of the women. These, he said, were his worst
subjects. In the first room sat eight or ten employed in spinning, while
one infuriated creature, not more than thirty, but quite gray, was
walking up and down the floor, talking and gesticulating with the
greatest violence. A young girl of sixteen, an attendant, had entered
into her humour, and with her arm put affectionately round her waist,
assented to everything she said, and called her by every name of
endearment while endeavouring to silence her. When the baron entered,
the poor creature addressed herself to him, and seemed delighted that he
had come. He made several mild attempts to check her, but she seized his
hands, and with the veins of her throat swelling with passion, her eyes
glaring terribly, and her tongue white and trembling, she continued to
declaim more and more violently. The baron gave an order to a male
attendant at the door, and beckoning us to follow, led her gently
through a small court planted with trees, to a room containing a
hammock. She checked her torrent of language as she observed the
preparations going on, and seemed amused with the idea of swinging. The
man took her up in his arms without resistance, and laced the hammock
over her, confining everything but her head, and the female attendant,
one of the most playful and prepossessing little creatures I ever saw,
stood on a chair, and at every swing threw a little water on her face,
as if in sport. Once or twice, the maniac attempted to resume the
subject of her ravings, but the girl laughed in her face and diverted
her from it, till at last she smiled, and dropping her head into the
hammock, seemed disposed to sink into an easy sleep.
We left her swinging and went out into the court, where eight or ten
women in the gray gowns of the establishment were walking up and down,
or sitting under the trees, lost in thought. One, with a fine,
intelligent face, came up to me and courtesied gracefully without
speaking. The physician of the establishment joined me at the moment,
and asked her what she wished. “To kiss his hand,” said she, “but his
looks forbade me.” She coloured deeply, and folded her arms across her
breast and walked away. The baron called us, and in going out I passed
her again, and taking her hand, kissed it, and bade her good-bye. “You
had better kiss my lips,” said she, “you’ll never see me again.” She
laid her forehead against the iron bars of the gate, and with a face
working with emotion, watched us till we turned out of sight. I asked
the physieian for her history. “It was a common case,” he said. “She was
the daughter of a Sicilian noble, who, too poor to marry her to one of
her own rank, had sent her to a convent, where confinement had driven
her mad. She is now a charity patient in the asylum.”
The courts in which these poor creatures are confined open upon a large
and lovely garden. We walked through it with the baron, and then
returned to the apartments of the females. In passing a cell, a large
majestic woman strided out with a theatrical air, and commenced an
address to the Deity, in a strain, which showed her possessed of
superiority both of birth and endowment. The baron took her by the hand
with the deferential courtesy of the old school, and led her to one of
the stone seats. She yielded to him politely, but resumed her harangue,
upbraiding the Deity, as well as I could understand her, for her
misfortunes. They succeeded in soothing her by the assistance of the
same playful attendant who had accompanied the other to the hammock, and
she sat still, with her lips white and her tongue trembling like an
aspen. While the good old baron was endeavouring to draw her into a
quiet conversation, the physician told me some curious circumstances
respecting her. She was a Greek, and had been brought to Palermo when a
girl. Her mind had been destroyed by an illness, and after seven years’
madness, during which she had refused to rise from her bed, and had
quite lost the use of her limbs, she was brought to this establishment
by her friends. Experiments were tried in vain to induce her to move
from her painful position. At last the baron determined upon addressing
what he considered the master-passion in all female bosoms. He dressed
himself in the gayest manner, and, in one of her gentle moments, entered
her room with respectful ceremony, and offered himself to her in
marriage! She refused him with scorn, and with seeming emotion he begged
forgiveness and left her. The next morning, on his entrance, she
smiled—the first time for years. He continued his attentions for a day
or two, and after a little coquetry, she one morning announced to him
that she had re-considered his proposal, and would be his bride. They
raised her from her bed to prepare her for the ceremony, and she was
carried in a chair to the garden, where the bridal feast was spread,
nearly all the other patients of the hospital being present. The gaiety
of the scene absorbed the attention of all; the utmost decorum
prevailed: and when the ceremony was performed the bride was crowned,
and carried back in state to her apartment. She recovered gradually the
use of her limbs, her health is improved, and, excepting an occasional
paroxysm, such as we happened to witness, she is quiet and contented.
The other inmates of the asylum still call her the bride; and the baron,
as her husband, has the greatest influence over her.
While the physician was telling me these circumstances, the baron had
succeeded in calming her, and she sat with her arms folded, dignified
and silent. He was still holding her hand, when the woman whom we had
left swinging in the hammock, came stealing up behind the trees on
tiptoe, and putting her hand suddenly over the baron’s eyes, kissed him
on both sides of his face, laughing heartily, and calling him by every
name of affection. The contrast between this mood and the infuriated one
in which we had found her, was the best comment on the good man’s
system. He gently disengaged himself, and apologised to his lady for
allowing the liberty, and we followed him to another apartment.
It opened upon a pretty court, in which a fountain was playing, and
against the columns of the portico sat some half dozen patients. A young
man of eighteen, with a very pale, scholar-like face, was reading
Ariosto. Near him, under the direction of an attendant, a fair, delicate
girl, with a sadness in her soft blue eyes that might have been a study
for a _mater dolorosa_, was cutting paste upon a board laid across her
lap. She seemed scarcely conscious of what she was about, and when I
approached and spoke to her, she laid down the knife and rested her head
upon her hand, and looked at me steadily, as if she was trying to
recollect where she had known me. “I cannot remember,” she said to
herself, and went on with her occupation. I bowed to her as we took our
leave, and she returned it gracefully but coldly. The young man looked
up from his book and smiled, the old man lying on the stone seat in the
outer court rose up and followed us to the door, and we were bowed out
by the baron and his gentle madmen as politely and kindly as if we were
concluding a visit with a company of friends.
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An evening out of doors, in summer, is pleasant enough anywhere in
Italy: but I have found no place where the people and their amusements
were so concentrated at that hour, as upon the “Marina” of Palermo. A
ramble with the officers up and down, renewing the acquaintances made
with visitors to the ships, listening to the music and observing the
various characters of the crowd, concludes every day agreeably. A
terraced promenade twenty feet above the street, extends nearly the
whole length of the Marina, and here, under the balconies of the
viceroy’s palace, with the crescent harbour spread out before the eye,
trees above, and marble seats tempting the weary at every step, may be
met pedestrians of every class, from the first cool hour when the
sea-breeze sets in till midnight or morning. The intervals between the
pieces performed by the royal band in the centre of the drive, is seized
by the wandering _improvisatrice_, or the ludicrous _puncinello_, and
even the beggars cease to importune in the general abandonment to
pleasure. Every other moment the air is filled with a delightful
perfume, and you are addressed by the bearer of a tall pole tied thickly
with the odorous flowers of this voluptuous climate—a mode of selling
these cheap luxuries which I believe is peculiar to Palermo. The gaiety
they give a crowd, by the way, is singular. They move about among the
gaudily-dressed contadini like a troop of banners—tulips, narcissus,
moss-roses, branches of jasmine, geraniums, every flower that is rare
and beautiful scenting the air from a hundred overladen poles, and the
merest pittance will purchase the rarest and loveliest. It seems a clime
of fruits and flowers; and if one could but shut his eyes to the
dreadful contrasts of nakedness and starvation, he might believe himself
in a Utopia.
We were standing on the balcony of the consul’s residence (a charming
situation overlooking the Marina), and remarking the gaiety of the scene
on the first evening of our arrival. The conversation turned upon the
condition of the people. The consul remarked that it was an every-day
circumstance to find beggars starved to death in the streets; and that,
in the small villages near Palermo, eight or ten were often taken up
dead from the road-side in the morning. The difficulty of getting a
subsistence is every day increasing, and in the midst of one of the most
fertile spots of the earth, one half the population are driven to the
last extremity for bread. The results appear in constant conspiracies
against the government, detected and put down with more or less
difficulty. The island is garrisoned with troops from Italy, and the
viceroy has lately sent to his brother for a reinforcement, and is said
to feel very insecure. A more lamentably misgoverned kingdom than that
of the Sicilies, probably does not exist in the world.
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