The Mind’s Museum in Rome addresses myths about mental illness with participatory exhibits like ‘‘Hearing Voices.’’

By ELISABETTA POVOLEDO

ROME - The logo of the Mind’s Museum is an overturned funnel. It is a reference to a 15th-century painting by Hieronymus Bosch that depicts a doctor using a scalpel to extract an object (the supposed “stone of madness”) from the skull of a patient. The doctor is wearing a funnel as a hat.
“It’s one of the earliest icons of madness,” said Pompeo Martelli, the psychiatrist turned director of this unusual museum, which is in the former psychiatric hospital of Santa Maria della Pieta on the northwestern outskirts of Rome. The painting, now in the Prado Museum in Madrid, invites the obvious question of who is more mad, the doctor or the patient.
The Santa Maria hospital was closed in 1978 after the passage of an Italian law substituting community services for institutionalized care of many of the mentally ill.
Overturning preconceptions about mental illness is the leitmotif of the eight-year-old Mind’s Museum , which reopened last month after a high-tech overhaul by Studio Azzurro, a Milan-based art collective that works mostly with interactive and video environments.
“The idea was to make it extremely participatory, a museum that can register and note the impressions of the visitor,” said Paolo Rosa, who founded Studio Azzurro with two other artists in 1982.
In one interactive installation, visitors try to synchronize recorded and mirror images of themselves. “It’s about seeking a balance between what you are and what you see,” Dr. Martelli said.
In another, visitors are invited to sit at a desk and hold their hands over their ears to hear the singsong whispers of unseen voices.
“The spectator assumes madness and unconsciously adopts the guise of someone on the inside,” Dr. Martelli said. “We didn’t want to dramatize but to include drama, and to let loose the imaginative dimension that madness elicits, which can be fertile even for those who think themselves as sane.”
The Mind’s Museum is a more hands-on - and heads-on - experience than other European psychiatric museums like the Dr. Guislain Museum in Ghent, Belgium, or the Het Dolhuys Museum in Haarlem, the Netherlands.
“It’s nice - it’s a way of lightening everything that happened in here,” said Maria Morena, a former psychiatric nurse at the hospital who can remember a time when patients lived 60 to a pavilion, eating with spoons (nothing sharp) and sleeping on cotton sheets so stiff that “they scratched like sandpaper.”
The museum is in Pavilion 6 of the former psychiatric complex, which today also houses national health system offices.
On a recent day Chiara Preti, a high school teacher who grew up nearby, toured the refitted museum as part of a training course with other colleagues. “The point the museum makes is that mental illness is a disease,” she said. “It doesn’t give a moral or a political judgment.”