Museo Laboratorio della Mente

The Museo Laboratorio della Mente (Museum of the Mind Lab), inaugurated in 2000, retraces the history of the Hospital Santa Maria della Pietà from its establishment as “Hospitale de’poveri forestieri et pazzi dell’Alma Città di Roma” (Hospital for poor foreigners and crazy people of the City of Rome) to its definitive closure in 1999, five centuries later, as a psychiatric hospital. It offers a journey through immersive-narrative memories in a mental hospital for a reading of otherness, of its forms and languages, to combat stigma and promote mental health.
The original tour (aided by the historical-audiovisual Archive and by the Cencelli Library of the Santa Maria della Pietà) is articulated as an historical map of institutional procedures and anti-institutional practices, as a double and continuous dialectical process of the deconstruction of the geography of spatial, physical, psychological and social constraints and reconstruction of subjectivity: a subjective experience that takes place when crossing the spaces of mental hospitals and in the appearance of the unexpected stories that are evoked.
The Museum won the 2010 ICOM Italia Award as “Museum of the year for innovation and attraction in relations with the public”.