Staff at Florence's Santa Maria Nuova hospital are accustomed to tourists arriving with dizzy spells and disorientation after viewing Michelangelo's David or the Botticellis in the Uffizi. The condition has a name: Stendhal syndrome, a psychosomatic reaction to great art that can include rapid heartbeat, confusion, hallucinations, and fainting.
It's named for the French novelist, who described what happened to him at the Basilica of Santa Croce — where Machiavelli, Michelangelo, and Galileo are buried — during an 1817 visit: "I had palpitations of the heart, what in Berlin they call 'nerves'. Life was drained from me. I walked with the fear of falling."
Italian psychiatrist Graziella Magherini gave the syndrome its name in 1989 after observing more than a hundred cases among Florence tourists. It isn't listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and psychologists still debate whether it exists as a distinct condition, though brain imaging shows that the areas involved in emotional responses light up when people are exposed to art.
In 2018, a visitor to the Uffizi had a heart attack while admiring Botticelli's The Birth of Venus.
Previously:
• Truman Show delusion
• American fanatic arrested for smashing 2,000-year-old Roman statues in Israel
