Carlo Gianferro

Photographer
MAD ABOUT YOU
Location: Rome, Italy
Nationality: Italian
Biography: Carlo Gianferro (b. 1970, Italy), is a freelance photographer based in Rome, he worked for from 2004 to 2008 with the Romanian and Moldavian wealthy Roma communities, as a result of this long term project he published two books "Gypsy... MORE
Private Story
MAD ABOUT YOU
Copyright Carlo Gianferro 2024
Updated Dec 2012
Topics Arts, Documentary, Family, Friends + Family, Hope, Italy, Joy, Love, Mental Illness, Personal, photojournalism, Portraiture, Psychiatric Hospital, theater, Trieste

MAD ABOUT YOU / A SHORT STORY ABOUT LOVE

"Love is a serious mental disease"

We'd better start from this sentence of Plato to talk about the love story of Gabriele & Donatella and their psychic conditions.

The meaning of the ancient greek philosopher’s sentence describes the emotional state that love could provoke in all of us, carrying us to emotional extreme states, to psychological excitements and irrationality, love takes away our faculty of evaluating reality. 

If love is a serious mental disease I think we all are happy to be mad.

Donatella and Gabriele are happy.

Their lives are consequences of families who couldn't express their emotionality since childhood, this loss of emotionality bought them to psychic sufferings and periods in sanitary structures.

In 2005 they got married, from the moment they met, they support each other, they have everything they couldn't have before and fully share everything. They work as actors at a theatre academy for "mad people" in the italian city of Trieste.

Trieste was the fisrt city in which psychiatric hospitals where closed and gradually replaced by a whole range of community-based services, including settings for acute in-patient care, This happened thanks to battles of the psychiatrist Franco Basaglia who obtained in 1978  the law 180.

Dr. Basaglia claimed that doctors have to cure mental diseases  but also partecipate and help the patients to establish social relationships with the outside life; he argued that patients do not need only treatments, but also human relations, Charlie and Donatella are a succesfull result of this far-sighted view of Dr. Basaglia.

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