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Liberi Tutti. Manicomi e psichiatri in Italia: una storia del Novecento [All Free: Asylums for the Insane and Psychiatrists in Italy: A Twentieth-Century History] written by the historian of psychiatry, Valeria Paola Babini, is a riveting account of 20th century Italian psychiatry. It is the history of a medical community's developments which intertwines with the history of Italian society, culture and politics, especially as the narrative progresses after World War II.
The book's start and end-points are two laws that have affected the history of mental asylums in Italy: law number 36, which was approved in 1904 and, for the first time, regulated mental hospitals on a national scale, and law number 180, approved in 1978, which decreed the dismantling of all mental hospitals on the Peninsula. These two laws mark the movement from the asylum as a means of social defence to the launch of a community-based system of mental health care, which was the end of the asylum era. Thus, this book is also the passionate account of how Italian psychiatrists, not without contradictions, moved from rejecting the insane as a social danger to integrating them into society, acknowledging the need for a dialogue between the world of the insane and that of the normal.