Why Olive Trees Are Crooked

It's the post-World War II era, the Basaglia law is still a long way off, and Volterra, the magnificent city of Etruscan origins nestled in the heart of Tuscany, is home to a gigantic asylum. That’s where the "treatment" methods alternate brutality with Lombrosian science, and the doors open to anyone: the admittedly insane, children whose parents are unable to support and who are guaranteed at least one meal within the sanatorium's walls, girls deemed "of easy virtue", and alcoholics.

Among the inmates, some of whom are engaged in excavation work to unearth a Roman theater, are Franco the Citrullo, who after being interned for several years earns a living by cleaning the dormitories; Tosca the Witch, a woman now in her eighties who reads the future by studying the movements of chickens or scrutinizing their innards, and spends her days surrounded by "many small, hairy women"; Nunzio "the Crooked," a situationist painter who was declared insane for having slashed a Raphael canvas in an art gallery.