This episode grows out of a real experience: a psychiatric hospitalization that took place a couple of months ago, following a severe anxiety attack triggered by a traumatic event.
This is not a clinical report and neither a formal critique.
It is a fantastic narrative built on the model of the journey to the Moon—the place where Ariosto hid Orlando’s lost reason. One day, perhaps, I will write about this experience in an academic, critical style; for now, only the distance provided by myth and allegory has allowed me to look at what happened without being overwhelmed.
Writing Lunatica was therefore, first and foremost, an act of survival.
I believe there are deep—often unnamed—limits in the ways our society approaches psychic distress: limits that turn care into containment, language into labels, and human complexity into administrable diagnoses.
This text does not aim to explain madness, nor to expose the distortions of psychiatric wards. Rather, it seeks to restore a measure of dignity and beauty to those who pass through territories that normality prefers not to see. It is an act of care for memory, but also a gesture of solidarity toward “lunatics” less fortunate than myself—those who remain trapped within the system.
If Lunatica exists, it is because telling the story was—and still is—one of the few ways I know to return to Earth without disavowing what I saw on the Moon.
Previous episode: Episode 18: To see the Stars again
The names of those whose wits therein were pent
He thus on all those other flasks espied.
Much of his own, but with more wonderment,
The sense of many others he descried,
Who, he believed, no dram of theirs had spent;
But here, by tokens clear was satisfied,
That scantily therewith were they purveyed;
So large the quantity he here surveyed.
(Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, XXXIV, 84)
The sky above Florence is not yet black, but thick and blue like ink before it dries.
The city sleeps, and from the hills comes only the light breath of the wind. I think the prayer is over, that the stars have fallen silent. And yet—something moves in the air.
From the highest point of the sky, where the Great Bear grazes the dome of Brunelleschi, a trail of light bends, coils, and finally draws a chariot—a strange vehicle, as if built by a child with materials stolen from a dream.
It has the frame of a bicycle, the headlights of a tram, the wings of a metallic bird, and the engine of a coffee machine. As it moves, it throws off sparks that smell of ozone and burnt sugar.
And it does indeed seem to have come out of a book for rebellious children, because standing at the prow of the chariot is none other than Viperetta, the girl who wanted the Moon and ended up taking an entire constellation.
(Antonio Rubino had sent her into space in 1919. He had tried to turn her into a respectable young lady—but she, apparently, never came back.)
She is dressed in regal rags: a tulle skirt stitched with star maps and a red velvet jacket stolen from a conjurer. Between her fingers she holds a battered spyglass and a paper kite, and she laughs as if the sky were a playground.
She does not fly—rather, she pilots her magical chariot with practiced mastery.
She is the little queen of thresholds, the guardian of dreams that refuse to enter therapy.
At her sides, seated like two mechanical friars, are the philosophers of Anti-Oedipus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.
The first, thin and angular, smokes a cigar that smells of libraries and Parisian fog; his eyes glitter with unfinished theories. The second, broader and more restless, gestures passionately, as if every word was an engine that must be restarted.
They are the Dioscuri of the unconscious, brothers of gears and vision, two halves of a single thought split between desire and concept.
“The universe is a factory,” says Deleuze. “Every idea is a screw that wants to turn.”
“And every madness,” adds Guattari, “is a loose bolt asking to be played, not tightened.”
Deleuze half-closes his eyes and concludes: “Schizophrenia is an engine. It is inner reality that cannot endure the speed imposed upon it.”
The chariot descends slowly, brushing the towers of Palazzo Vecchio like a wandering streetlamp.
Its wheels trace circles of light on the fog, and a low sound—a blend of generator hum and Gregorian chant—fills the air.
I remain motionless, unable to tell whether I am dreaming or whether I have been summoned.
The chariot stops a few meters from me; Viperetta greets me with a wide gesture, and her voice reaches me like an echo of water:
“Hi Margherita! You prayed well tonight. The stars listened. But the Moon…the Moon wants her share.”
Deleuze leans forward, with the air of an ironic confessor:
“You lost something up there, you know. A small vial of reason. It arrived by mistake.”
Guattari smiles, showing teeth white as grains of rice:
“No need to worry. We are experts in psychic repairs. And besides, on the Moon, the mad are not ill. It is the psychiatrists who are—so it is well known.”
The girl grips a copper lever in her hands and shouts: “So, are you coming or not? The journey is free, but healing must be paid for in courage!”
And in that moment I feel that I cannot stay on the ground. The air around me vibrates, grows light, almost liquid.
I reach out my hand, and Viperetta seizes it with the strength of a circus hook.
The chariot rises again, and with it the whole night. Florence shrinks, the hill of Fiesole lights up, and the world—my world—becomes a small blue marble rolling away.
“Welcome aboard,” says Deleuze, lighting another theory.
“Course set for the Lunar Ward,” adds Guattari.
“Where pain is treated with tides,” concludes Viperetta, “and reason is returned to those who had the courage to lose it.”
The chariot rises smoothly through the liquid air of the night, like a soft elevator. Florence crumples beneath us; its lights turn into fireflies and then into crumbs of bread in the dark.
“Don’t look down,” Viperetta tells me. “The Earth suffers from jealousy.”
Guattari begins to dismantle and reassemble a valve of the chariot as if it were a mechanical heart; ideas drip from his fingers like oil. Deleuze watches the firmament: it seems as though he is reading the night like an analytical index.
Silence grows, but it does not weigh on us. It is the silence of waiting rooms, of decisions about to become destiny. It offers the relief of calm just a moment before the storm.
Suddenly, the sky changes density. It is no longer air: it is glass. And yet the chariot passes through it with the ease with which it would pass through a soap bubble.
Before us appears an enormous circular portal, suspended in nothingness. It gleams like sterilized metal. At its center, a sign reads:
CUSTOMHOUSE OF REASON
(patient entry / survivor exit)
Two guards sit at either side: they are centaur-nurses, half men, half white horses, with ID badges pinned to their manes.
They flip through medical charts with agile hooves.
One of the two lifts his gaze and stares at me, as if recognizing me. “You are the one with the complicated genealogy.”
“I am the one who came back,” I say.
He nods. “The test is the same as your ancestor’s,” he adds.
On the monitor beside him stand out a date (1927); a name (Margherita); a diagnosis (melancholic hysteria); an outcome (not discharged).
The back of my neck goes cold.
Viperetta squeezes my hand tightly. “Listen. She did not die of madness. She died because no one believed she could leave.”
Guattari places a hand on my shoulder. “Remember: illness is not in the mind. It is in the cage.”
Deleuze smiles faintly. “And today, the door is open.”
The centaur-guard recites, as if performing a ritual: “To enter, you must voluntarily accept being called mad. To exit, you must prove that you are still yourself.”
He hands me a white wristband, with a small Moon drawn at its center.
“For identification,” he says.
My hand trembles slightly, but closes firmly around it.
“I accept.”
The centaur types something in. A beep, and a sliding door opens. From it pours a light that smells of disinfectant and lost dreams.
Before crossing the threshold, I hear a whisper behind me: like a warm wind, like a peasant blessing.
“This time, you’ll make it.”
I turn: for an instant, behind me, the face of my great-great-grandmother—the same profile as mine, older—smiles at me.
And then she vanishes.
I breathe in.
And I step beyond the threshold.
The door closes behind me with a metallic sigh. The air here is thick with faint sounds: the rustle of sheets, the muted beep of machines, the sound of the Moon thinking.
On a bed near the window, wrapped in a hospital-green blanket, lies Barbara.
Her face seems painted by light. Perfect eyebrows, a clear gaze, and on her lips a smile — that strange smile that appears only in those who have challenged the abyss and, for now, have come back.
She laughs often. She laughs all the time.
Because she is very depressed.
Her laughter is like glass cracking in slow motion: it does not shatter, but it hurts to hear. You look at her and you know that that laughter is a mask that covers nothing. It is an elegant surrender. A “I’m still here, and what can I do about it.”
When I tell her, “Sorry if I move around at night, I don’t want to wake you,” she replies:
“It’s fine. The one before you used to wake me up because she was screaming on the floor in a puddle of her own piss.”
And she laughs.
My stomach tightens. She, instead, is pure kindness: the kind of person you worry about, because the world eats people like her alive.
On the corner of the bedside table, a photograph: a woman with the same crooked smile, the same eyes like a stormy sea.
Her mother. Beautiful. Smiling. On lithium. Like a broken moon holding up the sky for her daughter.
Barbara plays with a rubber band between her fingers. She looks at me, without mercy but with truth:
“If life keeps slipping away from me, sometimes I dive in. Only this time… I don’t know. I was drunk. Maybe I didn’t really want to fly.”
She does not say die.
She says fly.
And I think there is an enormous difference between someone who falls by accident, and someone who falls because the world has taken the ground away from beneath their feet.
And I think that when it is my turn to leave, I would like to do it pirouetting.
I cannot sleep, so I get up and go for a walk.
The Moon has corridors that smell of disinfectant and interrupted dreams.
I follow them into a small, square, colorless room. On the wall, a sign: SMOKING AREA.
There are two chairs, a steel ashtray, and an extractor fan doing its best against the despair that burns together with the tobacco.
He is sitting on the floor, back curved, the cigarette trembling between his fingers.
Very young.
Too young to have wrinkles in his voice.
On his arms, on his legs, there are circular scars: small extinguished suns on his skin.
They are the embers of all the nights when someone should have held his hand and did not.
He does not look up when I enter. But I know that he knows I am there.
“Smoking is bad for me,” he murmurs.
“Then why do you do it?”
“Because at least the smoke doesn’t hit me.”
He taps the ash onto the floor instead of into the ashtray. A tiny act of freedom, in a place where “care” is synonymous with deprivation of personal autonomy.
He tells me his name, but the Lunar Ward rewrites it immediately: the Boy of Embers.
He was in a community. He smashed everything.
They put him under involuntary commitment.
He says the word the way one would say exile.
I ask him if he is afraid. He smiles with only one side of his mouth. “I’m afraid if I stop being afraid.”
Then he turns. And finally looks at me.
There is an entire constellation of unsaid things in his eyes. The kind of madness that Earth calls dangerous, but the Moon calls honesty.
Viperetta hands him a piece of chewing gum instead of a cigarette. He takes it. His hands are still trembling, but less.
I say nothing. They ask nothing.
And in that instant I understand: madness is not an escape from reality.
It is a disappointed love for reality. Too vast to remain confined within a body.
These two, Barbara and the Boy of Embers, are not “patients”: they are embodied prophecies of what the world refuses to name.
And it is here, among them, that I must recover my reason.
There are no clocks on the Moon. Time is a wound that breathes.
I return from the smoking room still carrying the acrid smell of burned silences; I pass through a small lounge, lit by a lamp that seems suspended in midair.
On an armchair sits a woman folded in on herself, a trembling statue. Her hands clutch her knees, her head bent like a leaf afraid of falling.
Her name is Hind.
Her skin has the color of amber warmed by the desert, and her dark hair frames a face that has been beautiful, strong, proud—and still is, even as it collapses.
She cries without sound. Only the body speaks: it vibrates, breaks, asks for help.
Her lips whisper phrases in Italian and Arabic, intertwined: a prayer, perhaps, or a curse of love.
Viperetta whispers in my ear:
“She flew up from Sicily on a broom made of despair. She wanted to beat her husband. But they stopped her before she could.”
A restraining order protects her from him—and at the same time imprisons her in her emptiness.
“My body wants the bottle,” Hind murmurs. “But my soul wants the sword.”
The veins in her neck are stretched like violin strings. Her trembling is not weakness: it is the symptom of a battle in progress.
On the opposite end of the sofa sits a biracial boy — the word mulatto comes to mind and I correct myself immediately, so as not to add wounds to wounds.
He is still, composed, like a monk without a monastery.
When our eyes meet, he gives me an imperceptible sign for silence:
“Think. But don’t say anything.”
His voice is a strategy, not a gesture. It protects the throat, like a hunted animal.
Later I will understand: the Church wants to silence him—perhaps because he loves in ways that do not fit their dogmas, perhaps because he has seen or said what he should not have.
He is hidden here. On the Moon. Where the invisible finds a place.
Hind lifts her head.
Her eyes—shiny, immense—are two black moons that fear no one.
She looks at me, studies me, chooses me.
“You’re not like them,” she says. “You’re not afraid of demons. I married the demons.”
I smile at her with all the breath I have. She nods, as if that smile were a weapon.
And I think: it is impossible not to love her.
Because there is a fierce beauty in women who rise from the bottom with their fists still clenched.
Viperetta grabs my wrist. “Come on. We can’t stop at just one trauma.”
I look at her one last time:
Hind wipes away her tears with a trembling hand and looks ahead.
Not up.
Not down.
Ahead.
Like a true Bedouin.
Like a woman who survives, even when she doubts that she wants to—or can.
Five days passed the way storms pass:
leaving puddles, more breathable air, and a certain distrust of weather forecasts.
I will not tell—yet—what happened in those one hundred and twenty lunar hours: the midday screams, the medications that lock the mad inside their own skin, the conversations about a world on fire and why the flames insist on following you through your veins.
I will do so when I am ready. For now, here is the final act.
I was sitting in the visitors’ room, my discharge report already printed:
Adjustment reaction with anxiety. Paranoid ideation in resolution. Patient dischargeable. No criteria for involuntary commitment.
Clear as the Moon. But the Earth is often opaque.
The psychiatrist—whom we shall call the Keeper of Labels—was observing me the way one observes a suspicious package.
“Oh! So you’re left-wing!”
I look at him. I smile like a creature who has just remembered she has teeth.
“No. I’m actually anarcho-communist.”
He furrows his brow, searching for another box to put me in.
“Oh! So you’re a feminist!”
“I prefer: gender jihad.”
His pupils dilate. A microscopic tremor of the pen.
“Excuse me—what did you say?”
“Yes. You see: I’m Islamic.”
And there it is: the moment when the alarm labeled SOCIAL DANGER goes off in the eyes of authority.
That expression is a door slamming shut, and I push it open with irony.
That is when I see her: my mother.
She enters like a horsewoman trained by patience, the cloak of someone who has seen too much, and love sharpened into a bladed weapon.
“She’s coming home with me now. And don’t fuck this up.”
Administrative translation: custody transferred to the mother.
The centaur-doorman of the Customs of Reason watches us as we cross the threshold. His voice is a benevolent verdict:
“Identification confirmed: the Mantis.”
It is the nickname my ward-mates gave me. The greatest compliment of my life. Because the mantis never goes mad alone: she brings her pain into the light—and bites.
Those who still need tides remain on the Moon. I return to Earth, but I do not go back.
I turn one last time. Barbara makes a heart with her fingers. Hind blows me a kiss straight into my eyes. The Boy of Embers raises two fingers in a peace sign, and the monk without a monastery closes his hands: a prayer that needs no voice.
The door closes behind me. The sky remains open ahead.
And my final diagnosis is:
I am alive.
And full of the irrepressible, unmistakable joy of a life that is setting itself free.
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