Inside the walls, outside the city. The analytical inclusion by categories in societies of the past

Raffaella Rubino, Paolo Contini, and Fabrizio Gentile focus their attention on the great socio-economic transformations of the XIX century, brought about by industrialisation and urbanisation, and how they contributed to the separation of groups into ideal and real spaces. The articulation of the population by social classes has not only caused a different logistic organisation of space, but also the concentration of categories of people within segregation places. The birth of the Italian State finds its acme in the consolidation of the institutions, which, by designing regulations aimed at defining criteria for inclusion, do nothing but determine a social exclusion. Mental hospital internment is a phenomenon that perfectly explains the expulsion of beggars, vagabonds, and mentally insane people from the community. An expulsion that is even more blatant if we consider the location of such institutions outside cities. This study aims at highlighting the “curative” therapy of mental asylums on the internees during the Nineteenth century. Alienists’ reports of the time witness how much – from a technical and scientific point of view – the division of the internees into different spaces, according to the kind of mental illness, constituted an essential pivot for the cure and allowed a better surveillance system.