{"id":798216,"date":"2026-07-13T19:55:10","date_gmt":"2026-07-13T19:55:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/798216\/"},"modified":"2026-07-13T19:55:10","modified_gmt":"2026-07-13T19:55:10","slug":"stendhal-syndrome-when-art-makes-tourists-faint","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/798216\/","title":{"rendered":"Stendhal syndrome: when art makes tourists faint"},"content":{"rendered":"

Staff at Florence’s Santa Maria Nuova hospital are accustomed to tourists arriving with dizzy spells and disorientation after viewing Michelangelo’s David or the Botticellis in the Uffizi. The condition has a name: Stendhal syndrome<\/a>, a psychosomatic reaction to great art that can include rapid heartbeat, confusion, hallucinations, and fainting.<\/p>\n

It’s named for the French novelist, who described what happened to him at the Basilica of Santa Croce \u2014 where Machiavelli, Michelangelo, and Galileo are buried \u2014 during an 1817 visit: “I had palpitations of the heart, what in Berlin they call ‘nerves’. Life was drained from me. I walked with the fear of falling.”<\/p>\n

Italian psychiatrist Graziella Magherini gave the syndrome its name in 1989 after observing more than a hundred cases among Florence tourists. It isn’t listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and psychologists still debate whether it exists as a distinct condition, though brain imaging shows that the areas involved in emotional responses light up when people are exposed to art.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In 2018, a visitor to the Uffizi had a heart attack while admiring Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus.<\/p>\n

Previously:
\u2022 Truman Show delusion<\/a>
\u2022 American fanatic arrested for smashing 2,000-year-old Roman statues in Israel<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Staff at Florence’s Santa Maria Nuova hospital are accustomed to tourists arriving with dizzy spells and disorientation after…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":798217,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[11480,64,63,104261,137,514,515,11428,128,374891],"class_list":["post-798216","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mental-health","tag-art","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-florence","tag-health","tag-mental-health","tag-mentalhealth","tag-psychology","tag-science","tag-stendhal-syndrome"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/798216","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=798216"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/798216\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/798217"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=798216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=798216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=798216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}