“The psychiatric hospital is an apartment block of saints. The poor crazy inmates tucked into their Chinese sheets – industrially manufactured shrouds – are saints, the nun lit up like an ex-voto by her bedside lamp is a saint. And the doctor is the saintliest of all, he is the head of the saints, he is Jesus Christ.” This is how Nicola describes his 35 years in the “electric asylum” and in his messed-up head reality and fantasy merge, producing unexpected illuminations. Nicola was born in the 1960s, “the fabulous sixties”, and the world he saw from the hospital is not so very different from the one passing by on the outside – an increasingly voracious world, in which the only thing there is no shortage of is fear.