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Launched at the very end of the nineteenth century on the initiative of some asylum directors in central Italy, therapeutic foster care was a form of assistance for the mentally ill that came as an alternative to being committed to an asylum. It consisted in entrusting the “chronically, quiet and harmless” psychiatric patients to families of nurses living in the surroundings of the asylum. This article aims to analyse the principles and purposes of this model, but also how it was put into to practice by questioning the experience of Reggio Emilia, through both the experiences of the patients chosen for the first trials and the writings of the doctors promoting the system. Started in 1898, ratified and generalized by the Italian law on asylums and the mentally ill (1904), foster care experience in Reggio Emilia ended in 1942. Due by and large to the constraints of the war, the needs of both the hosts and the asylums, no longer coincided: with the allowance granted by the province the hosts were no longer able to take care of the insane entrusted to their care and the asylums needed the work of the able-bodied patients to survive. Nevertheless, for several decades this system to some extent allowed for asylums to regulate their number of patients; for some families to benefit from additional income; and for many patients to get out of the institution while remaining under its control, both clinically and legally.