Stendhal's Syndrome

According to Magherini,[1] the necessary conditions include being a sensitive and impressionable personality who has undergone the stress of travel and has arrived at a city like Florence, which is haunted by the ghosts of famous people, and is imbued with a sense of art, death, and history. Sufferers are most often single females, aged between twenty-six and forty, usually travelling alone. All were well when they left home. Dr Magherini, who is also a Freudian psychoanalyst, believes that the art trip may be considered as a form of soul journey, an opportunity to gain in self-knowledge, but that it may provoke an emotional crisis, which not everyone is capable of coping with to the same degree.…