Memories of Pontito in San Fransisco
By: Maria Viscomi
When Magnani finally severed ties to Pontito and moved to San Francisco, he was checked into a sanitorium. He presented “ a crisis of decision, and hope and fear… a high fever, weight loss, delirium, [and] perhaps seizure” (158). Beginning with this stint in the sanatorium, Magnani began to have vivid dreams of the intense details of his childhood home. Then they began to transcend his unconscious state and remained before his “inward eye,” appearing like solid models in the physical room Magnani was in (159). He claimed that the visions called to him to paint them, and although he had minimal experience with art previously, he drew with almost impossibly intricate detail from his childhood memories. It is important to note that these were his childhood memories, for his recreations of the scenery showed Pontito's streets being wider, buildings taller, and the areas being more spacious (171). Had these seizure-like spells allowed Magnani to actually access the exact childhood memories he had created decades ago?
While there was never a precise diagnosis of this phenomenon, it is believed that he suffers from temporal lobe epilepsy accompanied by Geschwind’s syndrome-- but how did a healthy man begin to have seizures that transported him to scenes he had briefly glimpsed as a child? Oliver Sacks proposed that the traumatic events of his childhood combined with the need to preserve his culture resulted in a physiological state and an acute need that produced an endless supply of images from the past (167-168). His hypothesis may very well be correct, but due to a lack of proper diagnosis, we will never know what is truly happening in the brain and mind of Franco Magnani.