69. LETTER LXIX.
THE LUNATIC ASYLUM AT PALERMO.
Palermo, June 28.—Two of the best-conducted
lunatic asylums in the world are in the kingdom of
Naples—one at Aversa, near Capua, and the other at
Palermo. The latter is managed by a whimsical Sicilian
baron, who has devoted his time and fortune to
it, and with the assistance of the government, has carried
it to great extent and perfection. The poor are
received gratuitously, and those who can afford it enter
as boarders, and are furnished with luxuries according
to their means.
The hospital stands in an airy situation in the lovely
neighborhood of Palermo. We were received by
a porter in a respectable livery, who introduced us immediately
to the old barou—a kind-looking man, rather
advanced beyond middle life, of manners singularly
genteel and prepossessing. “Je suis le premier fou,”
said he, throwing his arms out, as he bowed on our
entrance. We stood in an open court, surrounded
with porticoes lined with stone seats. On one of
them lay a fat, indolent-looking man, in clean gray
clothes, talking to himself with great apparent satisfaction.
He smiled at the baron as he passed without
checking the motion of his lips, and three others
standing in the doorway of a room marked as the
kitchen, smiled also as he came up, and fell into his
train, apparently as much interested as ourselves in
the old man's explanations.
The kitchen was occupied by eight or ten people
all at work, and all, the baron assured us, mad. One
man, of about forty, was broiling a steak with the gravest
attention. Another, who had been furious till employment
was given him, was chopping meat with violent
industry in a large wooden bowl. Two or three
girls were about, obeying the little orders of a middle-aged
man, occupied with several messes cooking on a
patent stove. I was rather incredulous about his insanity,
till he took a small bucket and went to the jet
of a fountain, and getting impatient from some cause
or other, dashed the water upon the floor. The baron
mildly called him by name, and mentioned to him as
a piece of information that he had wet the floor. He
nodded his head, and filling his bucket quietly, poured
a little into one of the pans, and resumed his occupation.
We passed from the kitchen into an open court, curiously
paved, and ornamented with Chinese grottoes,
artificial rocks, trees, cottages, and fountains. Within
the grottoes reclined figures of wax. Before the altar
of one, fitted up as a Chinese chapel, a mandarin was
prostrated in prayer. The walls on every side were
painted in perspective scenery, and the whole had as
little the air of a prison as the open valley itself. In
one of the corners was an unfinished grotto, and a
handsome young man was entirely absorbed in thatching
the ceiling with strips of cane. The baron
pointed to him, and said he had been incurable till he
had found this employment for him. Everything
about us, too, he assured us, was the work of his patients.
They had paved the court, built the grottoes
and cottages, and painted the walls, under his direction.
The secret of his whole system, he said, was
employment and constant kindness. He had usually
about one hundred and fifty patients, and he dismissed
upon an average two thirds of them quite recovered.
We went into the apartment of the women. These,
he said, were his worst subjects. In the first room sat
eight or ten employed in spinning, while one infuriated
creature, not more than thirty, but quite gray, was
walking up and down the floor, talking and gesticulating
with the greatest violence. A young girl of sixteen,
an attendant, had entered into her humor, and
with her arm put affectionately round her waist, assented
to everything she said, and called her by every
name of endearment while endeavoring to silence her.
When the baron entered, the poor creature addressed
herself to him, and seemed delighted that he had
come. He made several mild attempts to check her,
but she seized his hands, and with the veins of her
throat swelling with passion, her eyes glaring terribly,
and her tongue white and trembling, she continued to
declaim more and more violently. The baron gave an
order to a male attendant at the door, and beckoning
us to follow, led her gently through a small court
planted with trees, to a room containing a hammock.
She checked her torrent of language as she observed
the preparations going on, and seemed amused with
the idea of swinging. The man took her up in his
arms without resistance, and laced the hammock over
her, confining everything but her head, and the female
attendant, one of the most playful and prepossessing
little creatures I ever saw, stood on a chair, and at every
swing threw a little water on her face as if in sport.
Once or twice, the maniac attempted to resume the
subject of her ravings, but the girl laughed in her face
and diverted her from it, till at last she smiled and
dropping her head into the hammock, seemed disposed
to sink into an easy sleep.
We left her swinging and went out into the court,
where eight or ten women in the gray gowns of the
establishment were walking up and down, or sitting
under the trees, lost in thought. One, with a fine, intelligent
face, came up to me and courtesied gracefully
without speaking. The physician of the establishment
joined me at the moment, and asked her what
she wished. “To kiss his hand,” said she, “but his
looks forbade me.” She colored deeply, and folded
her arms across her breast and walked away. The
baron called us, and in going out I passed her again,
and taking her hand, kissed it, and bade her good-by.
“You had better kiss my lips,” said she, “you'll never
see me again.” She laid her forehead against the iron
bars of the gate, and with a face working with emotion,
watched us till we turned out of sight. I asked
the physician for her history. “It was a common
case,” he said. “She was the daughter of a Sicilian
noble, who, too poor to marry her to one of her own
rank, had sent her to a convent, where confinement
had driven her mad. She is now a charity patient in
the asylum.”
The courts in which these poor creatures are confined,
open upon a large and lovely garden. We walked
through it with the baron, and then returned to the
apartments of the females. In passing a cell, a large
majestic woman strided out with a theatrical air, and
commenced an address to the Deity, in a language
strangely mingled of Italian and Greek. Her eyes were
naturally large and soft, but excitement had given
them additional dilation and fire, and she looked a
prophetess. Her action, with all its energy, was ladylike.
Her feet, half covered with slippers were well-formed
and slight, and she had every mark of superiority
both of birth and endowment. The baron took
her by the hand with the deferential courtesy of the
old school, and led her to one of the stone seats. She
yielded to him politely, but resumed her harangue,
upbraiding the Deity, as well as I could understand
her, for her misfortunes. They succeeded in soothing
her by the assistance of the same playful attendant
who had accompanied the other to the hammock, and
she sat still, with her lips white and her tongue trembling
like an aspen. While the good old baron was
endeavoring to draw her into a quiet conversation, the
physician told me some curious circumstances respecting
her. She was a Greek, and had been brought to
Palermo when a girl. Her mind had been destroyed
by an illness, and after seven years madness, during
which she had refused to rise from her bed and had
quite lost the use of her limbs, she was brought to this
establishment by her friends. Experiments were tried
in vain to induce her to move from her painful position.
At last the baron determined upon addressing
what he considered the master-passion in all female
bosoms. He dressed himself in the gayest manner,
and, in one of her gentle moments, entered her room
with respectful ceremony and offered himself to her
in marriage! She refused him with scorn, and with
seeming emotion he begged forgiveness and left her.
The next morning, on his entrance, she smiled—the
first time for years. He continued his attentions for a
day or two, and after a little coquetry she one morning
announced to him that she had re-considered his
proposal, and would be his bride. They raised her
from her bed to prepare her for the ceremony, and she
was carried in a chair to the garden, where the bridal
feast was spread, nearly all the other patients of the
hospital being present. The gayety of the scene absorbed
the attention of all; the utmost decorum prevailed;
and when the ceremony was performed, the
bride was crowned, and carried back in state to her
apartment. She recovered gradually the use of her
limbs, her health is improved, and excepting an occasional
paroxysm, such as we happened to witness, she
is quiet and contented. The other inmates of the
asylum still call her the bride; and the baron, as her
husband, has the greatest influence over her.
While the physician was telling me these circumstances,
the baron had succeeded in calming her, and
she sat with her arms folded, dignified and silent. He
was still holding her hand, when the woman whom we
had left swinging in the hammock, came stealing up
behind the trees on tiptoe, and putting her hand suddenly
over the baron's eyes, kissed him on both sides
of his face, laughing heartily, and calling him by every
name of affection. The contrast between this mood
and the infuriated one in which we had found her, was
the best comment on the good man's system. He
gently disengaged himself, and apologised to his lady
for allowing the liberty, and we followed him to another
apartment.
It opened upon a pretty court, in which a fountain
was playing, and against the columns of the portico sat
some half dozen patients. A young man of eighteen,
with a very-pale, scholar-like face, was reading Ariosto.
Near him, under the direction of an attendant, a fair,
delicate girl, with a sadness in her soft blue eyes that
might have been a study for a mater dolorosa, was cutting
paste upon a board laid across her lap. She
seemed scarcely conscious of what she was about, and
when I approached and spoke to her, she laid down
the knife and rested her head upon her hand, and
looked at me steadily, as if she was trying to recollect
where she had known me. “I can not remember,”
she said to herself, and went on with her occupation.
I bowed to her as we took our leave, and she returned
it gracefully but coldly. The young man looked up
from his book and smiled, the old man lying on the
stone seat in the outer court rose up and followed us
to the door, and we were bowed out by the baron and
his gentle madmen as politely and kindly as if we were
concluding a visit with a company of friends.
An evening out of doors, in summer, is pleasant
enough anywhere in Italy: but I have found no place
where the people and their amusements were so concentrated
at that hour, as upon the “Marina” of Palermo.
A ramble with the officers up and down, renewing
the acquaintances made with visiters to the
ships, listening to the music and observing the various
characters of the crowd, concludes every day agreeably.
A terraced promenade, twenty feet above the street,
extends nearly the whole length of the Marina, and
here, under the balconies of the viceroy's palace, with
the crescent harbor spread out before the eye, trees
above, and marble seats tempting the weary at every
step, may be met pedestrians of every class, from the
first cool hour when the seabreeze sets in till midnight
or morning. The intervals between the pieces performed
by the royal band in the centre of the drive, is
seized by the wandering improvisatrice, or the ludicrous
puncinello, and even the beggars cease to importune in
the general abandonment to pleasure. Every other
moment the air is filled with a delightful perfume, and
you are addressed by the bearer of a tail pole tied
thickly with the odorous flowers of this voluptuous
climate—a mode of selling these cheap luxuries which
I believe is peculiar to Palermo. The gayety they
give a crowd, by the way, is singular. They move
about among the gaudily-dressed contadini like a troop
of banners—tulips, narcissus, moss-roses, branches of
jasmine, geraniums, every flower that is rare and beautiful
scenting the air from a hundred overladen poles,
and the merest pittance will purchase the rarest and
loveliest. It seems a clime of fruits and flowers: and
if one could but shut his eyes to the dreadful contrasts
of nakedness and starvation, he might believe himself
in a Utopia.
We were standing on the balcony of the consul's
residence (a charming situation overlooking the Marina),
and remarking the gayety of the scene on the
first evening of our arrival. The conversation turned
upon the condition of the people. The consul remarked
that it was an every-day circumstance to find
beggars starved to death in the streets; and that, in
the small villages near Palermo, eight or ten were often
taken up dead from the road-side in the morning.
The difficulty of getting a subsistence is every day increasing,
and in the midst of one of the most fertile
spots of the earth, one half the population are driven
to the last extremity for bread. The results appear
in constant conspiracies against the government, detected
and put down with more or less difficulty. The
island is garrisoned with troops from Italy, and the
viceroy has lately sent to his brother for a reinforcement,
and is said to feel very insecure. A more lamentably
misgoverned kingdom than that of the Sicilies,
probably does not exist in the world.
