Halloween triggers my ghoulish spirit.....

I love learning about the hauntings of abandon castles with diabolical dungeons, eerie cemeteries filled with nefarious spirits, and ethereal beings lurking in the shadows of murderous forests but what I love the most are asylums.  I know but there you go.  I also love Italy.  I say that all the time so when I came across an abandon asylum in Milan, I turned on the Italian ghostbuster in me and found a gem of a wicked place full of history dating back all the way to 1863.


If you happen to be heading off to Milan, Italy, you might want to check this place out and please let me tag along.

Lesson in Italian, Manicomio is the Italian word for mental hospital.

The hospital was built in 1863 in Limbiate, Italy, close to Milan.  This place has a rather intriguing past to say the least.  The villa was constructed by the family of Lombard noblemen Pusterla.  The villa changed hands a few more times and became the headquarters of Napoleon Bonaparte (Villa Napoloen) during the French Revolutionary War while he was campaigning in Italy.  I did another post about Napoleon's time in Italy, and you can read that here if you like.

The villa was ultimately abandoned and was purchased by the Municipality of Milan (a fancy way of saying city council).  They decided to reconstruct the villa and transform it into a psychiatric hospital (Mombello di Limbiate).  In 1879, the Ospedale Psichiatrico Giuseppe Antonini was opened as the psychiatric hospital of Milan.

This new hospital could accommodate up to 900 patients but when they opened were already overcrowded and had upwards of 1200 patients.  There were only six doctors so you can do the math on that one and to complicate matters further, during the First World War, there were 3,500 patients.  This was the largest psychiatric hospital in Italy during the twentieth century.  They divided the patients up by degree of illness and severity of their disease.

There is documented proof that the earliest forms of electroshock therapy, a.k.a. electroconvulsive therapy, a.k.a. ECT, was developed by Dr. Ugo Cerletti, an Italian neurologist.  It is said he had this idea when he was at a slaughterhouse in Rome.  He observed the responses of pigs being electrically shocked prior to slaughter which cause them to convulse and become docile which in turn made it easier to kill them.  I guess he just thought, hey, lets electrocute humans to induce convulsions and see how it goes, which he did.

Those lucky patients with schizophrenia and depression were shocked to the point of convulsion repeatedly.  And while there were improvements, 80+ years later, psychiatrists will admit they are unclear how this technique actually works.  A few believe that this procedure causes a "good kind of brain damage" what ever that is.  Someone should have tested out this method on the good doctor himself.

In 1978, the asylum was shut down due to the Basaglia Law (Italian Mental Health Act of 1978).  The property was neglected and abandoned.  The buildings became dilapidated and were vandalized.  A few buildings were spared and are in use by a high school and a smaller healthcare facility but they are on borrowed time and will most likely be shut down in the near future.

I also found two random factoids that I thought were interesting, for example, did you know it is illegal for anyone to name a pig Napoleon in France.

I know, this is not really relevant but since Napoleon once resided here, I just thought I would throw that in here.  I do what I want to do.

Here is a better one.  The hospital (Mombello di Limbiate) hosted the illegitimate son of deadbeat dictator, Benito Mussolini.  (You can learn more about him here if you like but FYI, he is a total douche bag).

Yeah, so, it turns out that Mussolini attempted to arrange the death of Ida Dasler (his first wife) and his son with her, Benito, Jr.  Mussolini sent a couple of his fascist thugs to erase all evidence that either of them existed and kill them both.  Not only had the thugs failed to kill them, they missed a very important piece of information, a marriage certificate.  Oh, and there was also a document ordering Mussolini to pay child support (poor guy, he did not realize he was actually supposed to support his own children).

Mussolini eventually forced Ida Dasler into a mental hospital to silence her, and she was told her that her son was dead, which in reality he was not.  She ended up dying of a brain hemorrhage in 1937.  (They called it a brain hemorrhage but I am pretty sure a bullet in the brain can cause a brain hemorrhage but what do I know).  Benito, Jr., was kidnapped and imprisoned at Mombello di Limbiate.  In 1940, he tried to escape but that did not go so well.  He was captured and eventually died in 1942 under "mysterious circumstances."  That story is mentale, right?  I get on a roll and literally cannot stop.

If you are ready to head out and take a tour, click here for info.


I found this great video on YouTube if you want to take a look inside.

In bocco al lupo and Ciao!