Do you feel dizzy, confused and even hallucinations when you enter a museum ? Are you unable to contain the tears when walking through a beautiful city ? Do you blur your vision because of the magnificence of a musical work ?
Everyone, or almost everyone, has felt on some occasion how we get goosebumps before art , whatever the genre, but when the symptoms are taken to the extreme we are facing Stendhal syndrome and in Lifestyle we tell you what this psychosomatic disorder consists of.
The city that gives it its name
This curious disease is also known as Florence syndrome , since the discoverer of the condition, the French Henri-Marie Beyle –author who wrote under Stendhal's pseudonym-, first experienced the symptoms on her visit to the Basilica of the Holy Cross of the beautiful Italian city, at the beginning of the century XIX.In his work Naples and Florence: A trip from Milan to Reggio , he gathers his impressions:
«He had reached that point of emotion in which they find themselves the celestial sensations given by the Fine Arts and the passionate feelings.Leaving from Santa Cruz, my heart was beating, life was exhausted in me, I was afraid to fall, I did not feel able to reason and abandoned myself to my madness as on the side of a woman you love ”
However, the scientific basis of Stendhal syndrome, also called" traveler stress ", developed in 1979 the Italian psychiatrist Graziella Magherini after investigating more than a one hundred similar cases among tourists who came to Florence.
The delirium for art
The syndrome Stendhal is not something common and only affects people highly sensitive to artistic beauty , especially when they observe many works in an enclosed space and during a period of time.
Patients with this disease go from enjoying the beauty they contemplate to feel a contradictory discomfort that includes physical and psychic symptoms such as: tachycardia, sweating, blurred vision, dizziness, stress, anxiety, depression or euphoria...It is as if the subject could not bear so much beauty around him.
However, a sector of psychology maintains that the basis of "traveler stress" It is the suggestion and that only the symptoms develop as a result of the knowledge of the pathology, so it would not be a disorder as such, but a psychological phenomenon, just as if you suffer pareidolia and you are of those who see faces everywhere.
Suggestive or not, the truth is that the Hospital Santa Maria Nuova in Florence serves an average of a dozen tourists a year with this picture clinical.Have you ever felt these effects?
Even the director Dario Argento captured in 1996 the Stendhal syndrome in his movie of the same name , marketed in Spain under the title The art of killing .
And if the Florence syndrome occurs when we travel, we may be waiting for another path when we return home.If you want to know if you suffer the post-vacation syndrome , we recommend this article.
Images: Chema Concellon , Anna
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