Biography

Giovanni Vito Distefano studies Italian Literature, with a focus on Leopardi, the literary representation of asylum in early modern literature, and the European imagery of modernity. He received his PhD from the University of Cagliari, with a thesis on Leopardi’s Zibaldone. His most recent publications include the book-length essays Alle origini letterarie del manicomio. L’Ospidale de’ pazzi incurabili di Tomaso Garzoni (Longo, 2025) and «Quando Natura parla». Una traccia dantesca nello Zibaldone (Quodlibet, 2023).

Project Summary

Between the 16th and the 17th century the flourishing literary imagery developing around madness during Humanism and the early Renaissance – from the Narrenschiff to the Encomium Moriae, to Orlando Furioso – collided with the new orientations imposed by the Counter-Reformation program of cultural, moral, and political hegemony of the Roman Church. The result is a complex picture, still largely to be studied, from which a trend emerges: the insane become the specific object of well-defined procedures for the management of an interned population, within a global strategy of control of social complexity. In simpler terms, the idea of large-scale imprisonment of mad persons. This research explores the processes of diffusion, censorship, and transformation of  the ideas related to madness and mad persons in a cultural space enhanced by the improvement of printing and crossed by tremendous forces such as the intensification of ecclesiastical censorship, the constant solicitation for the production of “Catholic” writings, and the lively inclination of independent authors and publishers to fuel the debate with polemical and heterodox contents. The goal is to understand how the literature of the time – treatises, encyclopedic works, pamphlets, dialogues, edifying and burlesque poems – accompanied, followed, and sometimes preceded the affirmation of asylum as an instrument for the social treatment of madness.