Fantasy in red with variations by Roberto Ranieri
Rinzani, 2024
Review by Loredana Di Adamo
Behind the flickering of words, the signs of older struggles emerged in his studio: the movement of ’77, the Workers’ Avant-garde, with the ghost of Franco Basaglia in the background marking the compass of a very elastic north, that “theory-praxis” utopia” which inserted itself like a non-invasive tool among the topographies of human comforts and discomforts, as expected and unfulfilled possibilities of simply being in the world.
The teachings of Franco Basaglia, the young people who make the revolution, the new approach to the “cure” of “mental illness”, freedom, ideals never lost, years of revolts and great conquests. But there is not only this in Roberto Ranieri’s story, in this text of his, which is very smooth and compelling to read, there is much more, there is the story of an internal but also entirely Italian rebirth. An intertwining of lives, motives and humanity, that of the psychiatrist Fabrizio Ramacciotti, of the Basaglia school, and that of the author, his patient, who, together, decide to write to leave a mark, so that a history of struggles is not forgotten , of transformation and values, in which a doctor believed in that sense of the possible, and one of his patients can testify that it was worth it; because treatment cannot exist within a logic of power between doctor and patient, but we can only be saved together.
As I advanced along the corridor, cluttered pieces of old furniture slipped on the soft sides of my thoughts, like a ribbon of out-of-focus placeholders on the questions left in mid-air.
Ranieri is clever, he reverses roles, makes you lose orientation, and reading the text pushes you to move forward, to know how it will end.
I am a word seeker, I look for them for myself and for those who have lost them, so to speak.
From a book like this you expect the work of psychiatric reform to be narrated, but no, you find a narration in Pirandello style, through which Ranieri takes you into an imaginative story, full of symbols and metaphors often written in Venetian, where reality is linked to fantasy but you can recognize the signs thanks to the numerous references, from Vieri Marzi, to Boldù, from Berlinguer to “that twitch of eyebrows that sharpens the gaze in tears”…