San Servolo: The Island of the Mad
The Venetians call San Servolo “the island of the mad”. Let’s discover the origins of this nickname for the southern lagoon island, located between the San Marco basin and the Venice Lido.
The earliest records of San Servolo mention the presence of a monastery and date back to around the 9th century. In the 1700s, the island and its structures were converted into a military hospital and later into a psychiatric hospital by the Senate of the Venetian Republic. This function continued under both Napoleonic and Austrian rule.
The psychiatric hospital remained operational even after Venice was unified with the Kingdom of Italy in 1866. It was the Province of Venice that managed the so-called asylums and supervised their institutional transformations. The central Venetian asylums of San Servolo (for men) and San Clemente (for women) were renamed psychiatric hospitals and ultimately closed in 1978 due to the Basaglia Law.
Inside one of the island’s buildings, the Museum of the San Servolo Asylum was established in 2006. It hosts a collection of artifacts from the psychiatric hospital. The museum is divided into several sections: the laboratory, the clinic, teaching materials, patients and therapies, patients’ crafts and productions, the anatomy room, and a photography exhibition.
With our tours of Venice’s islands, you can explore this and other islands off the beaten tourist path.