Tourists Turn Up Artsick in Florence : Psychiatrist Believes Mass of Art Inundates Low Cultural Thresholds

Sometimes, one can get sick of all that culture during a European vacation.

That, anyway, is how it appears to Dr. Graziella Magherini, the head of psychiatry at Santa Maria Nuova Hospital in central Florence.

In the past 10 years she has treated more than 115 tourists for what she calls “Stendhal’s Syndrome”--an emotional reaction to hundreds of years of history and art, all hitting the traveler at once.

“The historical memory in these cities of art stirs the emotions,” she says. “They can be emotions of great pleasure but also of great pain.”

With its vast pink-and-green Duomo cathedral, its museums filled with Renaissance art and its dark cobbled streets, Florence is a throwback to another century--except, of course, for the hordes of backpackers and signs reading in English, “We make real Italian ice cream.”

Magherini maintains that the overwhelming sense of the past sometimes disorients tourists and leads to panic attacks, intense feelings of persecution and abandonment and a loss of a sense of reality and identity.

“Very often, there’s the anguish of death,” she says, prompted by the vivid sense of historical figures that reminds visitors of their own mortality.

Magherini’s work has aroused considerable interest, not to mention debate, in the hometown of Michelangelo, Botticelli and Donatello.

“It sounds simply ridiculous,” declares Serena Padova, assistant director of the Palatine Gallery.

Patrizio Ostecresi, administrator of the Duomo, says he has seen no unusual effect inspired by the church.

“People have committed suicide here,” he says, knitting his brow. “But I don’t think it’s the art.”

Nonetheless, the local government is interested in the research. The city of 425,000 receives 5 million tourists a year who spend upwards of $670 million.

The province of Florence last year gave Magherini and several researchers a grant to expand their study. They are now trying to get data from Venice and Jerusalem to see if the phenomenon exists there.

Magherini says she first noticed something wrong a decade ago, as more and more tourists visiting the works of art arrived at the hospital filled with anguish. A thing of beauty, it seemed, was not always a joy to behold.

Most people suffered psychological problems, but some also complained of heart palpitations or dizziness.

She perceived two categories of sufferers: solitary travelers, often Europeans of a sentimental bent, and members of organized tours who apparently have difficulty adjusting to new things.

Many of the latter group, she says, are Americans from small towns and “with a cultural level that is not very sophisticated.”

The team has studied the cases of 115 people who were hospitalized, but many other people were treated and released, Magherini says.

The researchers decided to name the problem after Stendhal, the French novelist who lived in Italy in the early 19th Century and wrote of being overwhelmed emotionally by the beauty and the past in Florence’s Santa Croce Church.

Modern Stendhals have reached crisis points before Michelangelo’s statue of David and Caravaggio’s painting of Bacchus, and under the concentric circles in the Duomo cupola, Magherini says.

However, it’s not like tourists are disturbed by a Donatello or terrified by a Titian. “It’s everything put together,” she says.

Magherini admits that the some of the symptoms may stem from travel weariness and stress.

However, she says, “most people have spoken of how they felt in this city, their rapport with this city.”

Dr. Paulo Pancheri, director of the Adult Psychology Clinic at the University of Rome, said people can be moved by historic cities but “it doesn’t seem likely it would be a syndrome.”

Nicola Carriglia, Florence’s tourism director, suggests that the problem is really the crowds and the quick pace of modern travel.

“It isn’t the monuments and the art that make people feel sick,” he insists.

Magherini advises her patients to rest and be with people of their own culture. In some cases, she prescribes tranquilizers.

“Italian cities of art are outside the reality of American life,” notes the Duomo’s Ostecresi. “Here a normal building is 300 or 400 years old. People sometimes feel like they’re in a film.”

Visitors need to take more time, he says, adding: “Even Stendhal tried to see too much.”