 Franco Basaglia was born on 11 March 1924 in Venice.After obtaining his medical degree from University of Padova in 1949, he trained in the local school of psychiatry, where he acquainted himself with the philosophical ideas of Karl Jaspers, Ludwig Binswanger and Eugène Minkowski, developed an interest in the study of phenomenological philosophers such as Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jean-Paul Sartre, and analyzed the work of sociological and historical critics of psychiatric institutions such as Erving Goffman and Michel Foucault.He died in Venice.