Historically, Vercelli mental asylum was built in the 1930s and was closed in 1978 after the Basaglia Law, that abolished mental hospitals in Italy. Of its 21 buildings, scattered over an area of 25,000 sqm, only one is still in use and it hosts the office of the environmental association ARPA, while the local health authority, which officially still manages the complex, left the area during the 1990s. This place is well known for the massacre of a group of fascist soldiers that happened between 12th and 13th May 1945 as retaliation by partisans. The news are few and not always certain, but here they were executed summarily and in a very bloody way, by some partisans of the 182th Garibaldi Brigade “Pietro Camana”, a group of Italian Social War soldiers taken from the stadium of Novara, at the time used at the prison camp.