It was "a celebrated lunatic asylum,"[2][3] both for its size and grandeur and for being "one of the earliest to discard the old system of harsh restraint.

This edifice, which is spacious and elegantly clean, has belonging to it a large garden and a handsome church; and that persons who are sent to this asylum may be pleased with its outward appearance, the grates of every window are shaped and painted to represent flowerpots filled with flowers.

The attendance here is particularly good, and the utmost gentleness and indulgence are practiced toward the patients, each of whom pays fifteen ducats per month; for which sum they live comfortably.

The first was a converted former Franciscan convent, and was used to house male patients who were "affected with the different forms of lunacy, uncomplicated, however, with other nervous complaints.

[1] Lady Blessington's early nineteenth-century praise for this institution in her "Idler in Italy" has been cited as contradicting Michel Foucault's thesis in Histoire de la Folie.