UNDULNA E-Book

Max Magi

• Herausgeber: Minerva Edizioni
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

The first of many journeys around the world opens up a whole new horizon for young medical student Max Magi. His travels will take him to the far corners of the world, destroying his certainties, yet bringing new strength to his deeply rooted values.
The very first voyage, to far away Madagascar, sets the foundation for the man that he will become thanks to his close contact with the first inspirational mentors on the medical staff in Antananarivo and the suffering of the patients. Indeed, it his here that his intellectual honesty and the courage to face any challenge are cemented in him.
We follow Magi in his polished, incisive narration as he gains understanding of the characters and cultures in four continents and learns how to apply the fundamental care and medical skills needed in so many different walks of life.
We finally arrive at our journey’s end to find a man that has become an internationally renowned name in orthopedic knee surgery and a pioneer in arthroscopy.
His autobiography, however, goes far beyond the reaches of the most advanced medical centers from Europe to the United States and turns into a story of adventure and danger, from street fights to near brushes with death in the midst of political turmoil in North Africa to the hidden dangers of the topical seas. As we follow him, we come to know a man and professional of great moral value who does not hesitate to go against established rules and customs to broaden the range of his field and his knowledge and to quench an insatiable thirst for knowledge and a burning curiosity.

Leseprobe

MAX MAGI

UNDULNA

A LIFE

OF ADVENTURE

AND MEDICINE

MINERVA

RITRATTI

Collana

The author wishes to thank

Folco Quilici

and Professors

Lucilla Stacchini

and Laura Campanile

for their priceless advice.

I also wish to thank

Angelina Dorotea d’Ippolito

for the transcription of my story.

Editorial Director: Roberto Mugavero

Graphics and layout: Ufficio grafico Minerva Edizioni

© 2015-2017 Minerva Soluzioni Editoriali srl, Bologna

Images © Max Magi

Artistic and literary copyright reserved worldwide.

Any reproduction, in part or whole, is prohibited.

ISBN printed version 978-88-7381-763-5

ISBN eBook 978-88-7381-874-8

Via Due Ponti, 2 - 40050 Argelato (BO)

Tel. [phone] - Fax [phone]

www.minervaedizioni.com

[email protected]

Indice

Undulna, goddess of the sea

As wild as pinewood hedgehogs

The house in the center

Tenacious and strong-willed

The Buca di Zibello and alkaline and acid phosphatase

Not just blood tests

Slivoviz on the veranda

Facts, not words

Not by force, but by art

The wristwatch

Le Pierre Loti

A miniature Paris on the Plateau

Listening to the heart

Manan Caval

A smile and mortal fear

The trigeminal map

Jean Fuss

Les Côtiers

Crocodiles in the night

A leather sack full of stones

A pocket close to the heart

The legionnaires and the Sons of the Nile

Nothing to declare

The promised postcard

Extraction

A stroke of luck

Paul

The dolphins off the bow

In Russia with Curzio Malaparte

Mareza

The Royal Surgeon and the Italian Polydoctor

Knowing that you know nothing

”Baby asleep”

The tobacco pouch

The miracle of Allah

Arm in a sling

David and Goliath

A cage on the balcony

Boredom and safety or adventure and uncertainty

The landscape increases expectations

The Great Barrier

What to do and what not to do

Machete cuts and crocodile bites

Ahmed

Abdi

Diving adventures

Drowned like a rat

Celebration of the prophet Mohammed

An unusual Safari

Backlash

The Bay of Death

Orthopaedics and magic tricks

A bridge on the Rhine

An index finger where the thumb should be

”What is important isn’t what you have lost, but what remains”

Longing for Africa

The white elephant

Surgeon and farmer

Mister Registrar

A changing hospital

Corrado

Jack Hughston: the philosophy of the knee

Alessandro

”Five in one”

Cosmonauts in the operating room

American “friendly fire”

Man knife and fork

Bill Travis

A wonderful day

Arthroscopy

Lanny Johnson

The 5 P rule

Federico

The builder from Matera and the short-sleeved shirt

Old and new horizons in surgery

The scribbled napkin

Le Cuisinier Italien

The Genu Foundation

The rocks of Rabbit Island

A very long waiting list

The professorial paper and Milo Manara

Equinotialis circulus: the Bajuni Islands

The Nakhuda

Reflections

Sleepy banks

Federico is no more

The parable of the beach

Goodbye Sondalo

A new world

Back to Madagascar

Undulna, goddess of the sea

Nothing happens by chance,

but everything occurs according

to a preordained thought

and an unavoidable destiny.

Protagoras of Abdera (IVth century BC)

“Mesdames et Messieurs le Pierre Loti va appareiller. Messieurs les visiteurs sont bien priés de quitter le bateau”1. My thoughts were drawn to the words of the announcer coming from the onboard loudspeaker inviting visitors and escorts to leave the ship which was about to cast off. That was the ship that was to take me to Madagascar. From the veranda of my haven just a few meters from the ocean, I thought about my turbulent existence that would have been marked precisely by that trip in far-away 1962.

I was born under the sign of Cancer seventy-seven years ago, I have always been drawn to the sea since very early childhood. Indeed I thought the sea had filled a good part of my existence, but now I had the impression that the long, intense film that was my life had passed in the blink of an eye and was destined to be over soon. So many things had happened in such an active, manifold life, a life of great sacrifices, but never boring, on the contrary sometimes even exhilarating although at times full of danger. What I liked to call my haven was a simple stone house surrounded by a wooden veranda which was painted a blinding white and stood out clearly against the turquoise balcony. Yet, what made it unique was the position. It was hidden away from prying eyes in a thick palm grove, protected by large wild tamarind plants and connected to the sea by stairs carved into the rock. The sea was transparent and always calm since the movement of the ocean waves was broken by the island about a mile ahead which made up my horizon.

The sun was already high in the sky when I noticed the form of a small sailing ship advancing close-hauled with full sail. I thought it was a vintage boat, perhaps a wooden Camper qNicholson. I was fascinated by such an elegant little sailing ship that could cut through the ocean with such determination. The romantic idea of a wooden hull crafted by the expert hands of a master shipwright took me back to the vision of my first boat: Undulna.

A boat

her name was Undulna

Her blue was deeper than the sea.

She flew the skull and crossbones

and her enemies would flee.

My father had given her to me because I had done well at school. She had been built in Cervia by the talented Girometti, a ship’s carpenter with penetrating blue eyes and of few words who tolerated the frequent visits of an eleven-year-old boy with barely hidden annoyance. To my eyes, the boat was beautiful, it was to be the first and only pleasure boat in Cervia and the last one built by Girometti. The launch was a rather unusual event for a small fishing port. The boat, with mainsail, topsail and jib, was decorated with bunting and we even had the inevitable bottle of bubbly. My mother, Silvia, a literature teacher and writer, had the role of godmother and the task of naming the boat. The name she chose seemed too refined to me. There it was, clearly visible on the stern in raised, brass italics, reminding me with its onomatopoeic name of the sound of the undulating waves as well as the name of one of the Nereids, daughter of Nereus and Doris. She was a sea nymph. I just couldn’t accept that name: Undulna, Instead of something like Barracuda, or Southern Cross or even Windeater, names a boy would like. As it was the name attracted the ridicule of my friends: “What’s up with that name, man?”

The intense, moving memory of my first boat took me back to relive the feelings of that carefree, happy period of my life.

1 Ladies and gentlemen, the Pierre Loti is about to set sail. Visitors are kindly asked to disembark.

As wild as pinewood hedgehogs

My mother had convinced my father to buy a villa in the seaside town of Milano Marittima, one of the few that existed back then on that splendid coast. The house was called “La Madonnella”, the little Madonna, and it was a three-storey building surrounded by a thick, widespread pine wood. The house looked out onto a beach where we children were to grow up after our house in Bologna was destroyed and we spent some time as evacuees in the swampy Marmorta. We were “wild and free like pine-wood hedgehogs.” I remember that period as one of the happiest of my life. My father, Corrado, had a dental practice in Bologna and with his motorcycle, a splendid English Ariel, he would join us every weekend. Despite being a highly cultured humanist, he was forced to enter the medical profession out of respect for a family tradition and so he had decided to specialise in orthodontics, the least demanding of the medical practices which he exercised quite successfully. He expected three things from his children: that we didn’t hit each other, that we were good at school and we always told the truth. As long as we did these things we could even burn the house down and it would not have been that important. He was a good man, loyal and physically strong and a fanatical boxing fan, having practiced the sport in his youth. Indeed he called me Max in honour of the two heavyweight champions Max Schmeling and Max Baer. However, back then Italian law didn’t allow parents to give their children foreign names so I was officially Massimo, but I have always been Max for everyone.

I had to interrupt my studies repeatedly because of our continuous moves due to the war and I did my first year of primary school in Parma under the supervision of my grandmother, Dafne, a teacher and holder of the gold medal for civil valour. She took care of my schooling, but above all my emotional education. Indeed, every evening she would read me a short story that always had a moral. It was an old book with a worn leather cover which she had, in turn, inherited from her grandmother: The one hundred short stories. I remember one in particular:

One day Water, Fire and Honour decided to get together. Water said: “if you wish to find me again one day, look for reeds and thick vegetation because I won’t be far away.” Fire said: “it will be easy to find me as well. You will simply have to look for columns of smoke and I will be there.” But then Honour said: “never let me leave your side, for once I have left I will never be able to return. “

I loved living in Parma. Grandpa Tullo was my idol. He was a surveyor for the state department of public works and a colonel in the Alpini, the alpine division, and during the First World War he had conquered the Palone peak, a strategic point in the fight against the Austrians. As a liberal and antifascist, he was sent off to Calabria during the fascist regime. Ironically, the street that ran close to our house in Parma was named after Palone peak. I never heard my grandfather boast about his military endeavours or his numerous medals of honor. When someone tried to ask him a question, he would simply answer that war was a terrible thing.

My uncle Franco, a nonreligious doctor and dentist who was a bachelor, became a kind of second father to me. He introduced me to the magical world of Emilio Salgari, the writer. Every week a new book was published, by the editor Nerbini of Florence, about the adventures of the Black, Green and Red Buccaneers, the mysteries of the dark jungle and finally Sandokan and the pirates of Malaysia, Uttagori the Flayer, the Mahadi’s favorite and so on.

After buying the house in Milano Marittima, between 1947 and 1948, we moved to the small Romagna area town where I attended the fifth and last year of primary school with a private tutor since the local schools only went up to the third year. My mother, who was pleased to have brought us all together on the Adriatic coast, would always repeat the same thing which I still remember:

“It is of utmost importance for a child’s soul that he grows up in a serene, carefree environment and that he has a happy childhood. After that they can face any hardship that comes their way in the years to come without problems.”

I really believe she was right.

The house in the center

In Milano Marittima there were no schools for my brother Franco and I to go to so, to our great dismay, we sold “La Madonnella” and started building a house in the center of Cervia on a plot of land that belonged to my grandfather. While we were waiting for the house to be finished, we stayed in a single house right on the sea, at the end of the village of Borgo Marina. We didn’t like it in Cervia, we desperately missed our friends in Milano Marittima: Pervul, Dufén, Armànd and their many brothers. What was more, and much worse, was that we no longer felt free, I could no longer go around with my rifle shooting as much as I liked without a licence to carry. There were no more bunkers to blow up or projectiles to disassemble. Yet we weren’t that far from Milano Marittima. All you had to do was cross Porto Canale, the canal that also acted as a port. In Cervia life changed drastically. There was a new middle school with new teachers and new subjects such as French and Latin and I didn’t do well. I could get by in Italian, but struggled with arithmetic and Latin. Let’s not even consider technical design. I was always failed with a five out of ten and then at the make-up exam in September the commission would pass me. The loss of our magical childhood world was really tough on us. In the time that followed any excuse was good to get back to Milano Marittima, to the real, close friends who would be friends forever. In Cervia everything was different, even the relationships among people and friendships weren’t the same. There was even a difference between Borgo Marina on the outskirts and the center, actually the main square. The people of Borgo were definitely more primitive in comparison. For them being considered a “piazzaròl”, a square-dweller, was an insult, like saying they were soft and had no balls. Not a week went by without me being involved in one or two fights because I was challenged or provoked. It never happened to my brothers. It seemed that for some reason I was considered invincible among my peers. This was for rather trivial reasons really. Once of these was that I used to wear a golden bracelet which had my name inscribed on it along with the motto from the three musketeers: “One for all and all for one.” People thought it was something strange and unusual. Another issue was the fact that I don’t pronounce my “r” correctly. If the bracelet and the weak “r” were considered effeminate, the beatings I handed out definitely weren’t. In Borgo Marina they organized endurance races where you had to run for several miles around the neighborhoods. My adversaries often dropped out of the races when they got stitches, but I felt no pain and won easily. My brother Franco would follow me on his bike and cheer me on, telling me not to give up and to go even faster. The prizes weren’t much, jut kids’ magazines and comics or glass marbles and packets of candy.

There was nothing in the square, just Don Stefano’s parish. How could I have hung around at the parish since I had shot at priests with my slingshot? It reminded me of something that had happened a few years before. I was with my usual gang of which I was the leader, when a boy from the priest’s gang crossed the stretch of beach which we considered ours without asking for permission. We chased him and to stop him I shot him in the leg with an arrow and he fell. My bow had been made with umbrella spokes held together with wire. The arrow was a stick with a weight to keep it steady. The boy started crying as I took the arrow out of his leg. I told him he could go, but he was not to enter our territory without written permission. This occurred in front of a summer camp run by the clergy. Even though it was late fall and there were no children, there were some priests. One of them saw the scene and fell upon us like a hawk. He was really tall and looked like a giant to our eyes. He grabbed the smallest of us, my brother Muni and shouted threateningly in his face: “You have insulted my father, you have insulted my mother and now I’m going to take you to reformatory!”. Muni started crying his eyes out. Everyone was intimidated by that strange imposing and threatening presence. I stepped in front of the priest and looked him straight in the eyes. I didn’t have my rifle with me, but I had a devastating semi-professional slingshot that had been bought in an armory. I never shot stones with it because they could be sent off course by the wind, so I used pieces of lead that had been extracted from projectiles and worked into a suitable form. I pulled it back as far as I could and aimed at the priest: “Either you let my brother go, or I smash your face.” He must have been an intelligent man, because he understood that that young boy wasn’t making idle threats. He let go of Muni, who stopped crying. The priest went pale and seemed not to know what to do. He started backing up slowly without taking his eyes off me. I kept my slingshot on him. When he thought he was safe he made a silly mistake: he ran for it, looking very undignified, and as he tried to get over the fence his cassock caught in the barbed wire. Thinking back to that event I decided it wouldn’t be a good idea to go to the parish. I thought of how much I had changed since my early childhood. Once my mother had come home from Bologna to find me sleeping squashed up against the wall with plenty of room in the bed. When she asked me why, I told her that it was to leave room for the angel that sat on my shoulders.

The boredom of the Cervia days, aside from the occasional fight, was suddenly interrupted. My father was taken to hospital for a serious hemorrhage due to a stomach ulcer. It seemed like he was going to die. It was Christmas Eve. My mother woke us, fighting back the tears so we could go to the hospital and wish him a happy Christmas. My father didn’t even have the strength to speak and he was deathly pale. What passed as a hospital in Cervia was no more than a transfer point where at most they could put a few stitches. A gastrectomy was out of the question.

With the prospect of high school looming, since I was in my last year of middle school, we had to decide where I would go. The kind of institute I was to go to didn’t exist in Cervia, so we decided I would go to Bologna where my father had his dental practice. My parents thought about selling the house, while my boat, Undulna, was beached.

My father, meanwhile, had been operated on by a good surgeon who had resected part of his stomach, but he was starting to have cardio-circulatory problems. In our family tradition they were all doctors and they had all died of heart attacks in their medical studies at a young age. I feared that, sooner or later, the same thing would also happen to my father. I was seriously worried.

Tenacious and strong-willed

I passed my middle school exams which I did privately and was enrolled at the Domenico Romagnosi Institute in Parma. I was therefore once again living with my grandparents.

My grandmother Anita, had turned to religion after the separation from her husband, who was a highly competent doctor, and she occupied her time with theology. To please my father, however, who wished me to spend some time with his mother and family and not only with my maternal grandparents, I agreed to spend my summer vacation in Calcinaia. In the end the summer stay lasted longer, because my father decided it would be a good idea for me to take up residence there with an old friend of his who was almost a brother to him. This friend was a medical colonel who oversaw the military district of Pisa and he would have exonerated me from military service. Calcinaia was where I had my first crush on a girl, although there was nothing physical.

My grandmother’s younger sister, Elvira, was happy to put me up. She was friendly, with short hair and very masculine looking. She had founded the local fascist organization in Calcinaia and always carried a Beretta pistol with her. Her father, Gioacchino Argamini had been a very rich man and had followed Garibaldi and in 1866 fought in the third war of Italian independence. My great, great grandfather, Doctor Gaudenzio Magi, was condemned to death by the Grand-duchy of Tuscany in contumacy because he was a member of the revolutionary Carboneria movement. He was able to escape the sentence by moving to Emilia, which then was part of the papal state. To this day I have the document of the sentence, written in Indian ink and issued by the Santa Croce dell’Arno police district in Florence. It was a well-known fact that, after the second world war, women who were involved with the fascist regime were subject to humiliation, insults and ridicule. They usually had their heads shaved, often in public to the joy of the onlookers. Straight after the war, a last-minute partisan went up to Elvira’s housemaid and told her to inform the mistress that he would soon be passing by the villa to shave her head. Madame Elvira sent the maid back to the unsavoury individual with a message. The gist of the message was the she sincerely doubted he would have the courage to come and shave her head, but that if he did he could expect a couple of bullets in the head. Nobody showed up.

Every morning at six I would wake up to take the bus to Pontedera, a town famous for the Piaggio Motors company, where I went to school without any great enthusiasm. My only leisure activity was running. I had started up again with an old passion, and I threw myself into it, training on my own. In the student championships held in Pisa I was the best in the school. At the end of the year I was failed in only one subject with a five out of ten in maths. In a classical studies school a five in maths with strong passes in all other subjects was almost funny. However, that was not the case. The teacher was a young substitute who was shy and awkward, who had an interest in a young beautiful blond student with blue eyes who flirted with me. Our gazes would often catch his and he would become as red as a tomato. No big deal, we even laughed about it sometimes. In October I showed up for the make-up exam and was once again failed with a five. It was the first time that I had failed a year. It was doubtless the cowardly revenge of a worm. I had to repeat the year with my brother Franco at the Marco Minghetti Institute in Bologna.

In Bologna there was the headquarters of an important sport franchise, Virtus, which had a basketball team that won championships in the top division as well as an important athletics team. I went to see the coach of the national athletics team, Lauro Bononcini, telling him that I wanted to run. He had me do a lap and suggested, considering my abilities, that I train for middle-distance racing. He even had me training with a group of adults who were already registered with the FIDAL (Italian Athletics Federation). The training would start in the evening at six, a time when the others had finished work and I had finished my homework and prepared the lesson for the following day.

Virtus had a sport field with a real track where only the athletes that belonged to the team could train. Three times a week, rain or shine, you had to do thirty-nine laps, which were ten miles, in under an hour. This was to train the characteristics required for that kind of race: breath and physical resistance to prolonged strain.

We ran in single file and the line was headed by the Ghirardelli brothers who were top-level athletes with a lot of victories under their belts. They would always start with a fast pace, as if they were only doing a few laps and not thirty-nine. Around the thirteenth or fourteenth lap I couldn’t stand the pace any longer and started to lag behind. In the gathering shadows of the evening I would hear the voice of the coach shouting: “Magi, attack them, I said attack them! You have to take the lead!” The only option I had was to obey the strict order. I felt the struggle was unfair: they were adults from the first series and I was a sixteen-year-old aspiring to the third series. I couldn’t compete. Instead it seemed a small miracle would happen. It seemed that the rush of adrenaline from the great effort gave me new strength. The same thing happened around the twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth lap.Then I would finally finish, exhausted, but with the group. On the alternate days, again at six p.m. and in the winter, in a large gym in the center of Bologna, we would follow a training program aimed at developing the chest and muscles with floor exercises and especially stretching.

In January the cross-country races in Bologna and other cities of the province were going to be held. I was ecstatic. My name could be seen among the top six athletes on Monday morning in the initial pages of the main sports newspaper the “Stadio”. One day I even arrived second out of around fifty participants. I was thrilled. I proudly showed the article to my mother in which I was described as “tenacious and strong-willed” and “a young hope for middle-distance racing.” She very cleverly said: “They’ve described you perfectly in just two words.”

It was February and under the supervision of their various P.E. teachers the young athletes from the schools were just starting to stretch their legs and work on their breathing. My program had changed. I had more than enough breath as well as resistance and effort. Having done thirty miles a week meant a total of almost four hundred. The aim of the training was now to increase speed. I had to run the two-hundred meter race ten times alternating with a fast lap taking deep breaths. The great irony was that the P.E. teacher at the Minghetti didn’t put me on the team, because I had asked to be excused from P.E. to have more time to study, and so I didn’t participate in the provincial student races.

During the summer holidays we would go back to Milano Marittima or Cervia where my mother rented a house. I therefore had the chance to sail with Undulna. My brother, Franco, had a beautiful twin-hulled rowing boat for racing, with four oars and two sliding seats. My mother had had it built at the shipyard of Adriano in Borgo Marina. It was the legendary Tarzan 413.

On the beach we would play volleyball. I had trained in the sport when I was at school in Parma with Professor Renzo del Chicca, who was the coach of the national team as well as C.U.S. Parma which would often win the national championships. In one of the many matches in which I was playing against my brother, there was a disagreement on a game-deciding point. The match had been quite heated and attracted a small crowd of spectators. We argued bitterly and in the end my brother told me that I couldn’t understand because I had failed a year at school. It was like a slap in the face. I phoned my mother straight away and told her that I had to interrupt my vacation and go to Montecatini Terme to my father’s sister, Aunt Maria, to study Latin and Greek all summer. My mother was surprised and didn’t agree with such a sudden choice, but I was adamant.

To my great surprise I really enjoyed Montecatini and I stayed to attend the following school year at the Nicolò Forteguerri school in Pistoia, famous in all of Italy for being a very strict institute. I would wake up every morning at six and take the bus to Pistoia and would come back in the afternoon to study Latin under the strict guidance of my aunt. I also took private lessons with a famous Greek scholar, Professor Fabbri, who couldn’t understand why I was so determined to study Greek so intently since I already seemed to have become part Greek.

In the evening, three times a week I practiced at the sports field come rain or snow. I was alone and really missed my time at Virtus Bologna.

That year I passed with full marks and won the one thousand five-hundred meter cross-country and one thousand meter track races hands down.

When I got back to Parma I was in the same class as my brother, Franco, but this time I was top of the class in translating from Latin to Greek and from Greek to Latin. I had made my come-back. I would always be grateful to my brother for that unfortunate phrase which was the trigger for me to work so hard on improving. The final high-school exam was a real massacre: out of thirty-two students only five passed and the Magi bothers were the best.

During my high school years I had come to love philosophy. Professor Corradi was an intelligent, sensitive and very kind person. He had fought on the Russian front where he had lost part of his feet to frostbite. Therefore the trousers he wore seemed too big for his reduced feet which earned him the nickname “bragòn” (big britches). For all of the last year of high-school the class had witnessed a running dialogue between the professor and me. Nevertheless, after graduating, family tradition and the need to help my father, who had heart problems, lead me to choose the faculty of medicine instead of philosophy.

One evening in September, as I was coming home, I was surprised to see Professor Corradi on the landing of the house in Via Rustici, where we lived. He was red in the face, his eyes were wet and he didn’t even say hello to me. I went inside and asked my mother what had happened, She was lost in thought and pacing back and forth, smoking yet another cigarette. At first she didn’t even seem to notice me. She related the conversation with Professor Corradi who had said that it was a crime for me to have chosen medicine for a whole series of reasons, but particularly because, in his opinion, I not only thought but “lived according to philosophy.”

I was speechless and upset for having disappointed my professor. That night I couldn’t get to sleep.

The Buca di Zibello and alkaline and acid phosphatase

I was certain I had made the right choice and I got straight down to studying anatomy on the legendary Chiarugi text. Giulio Chiarugi had been an emeritus professor for over forty years at the University of Florence. It was really hard to pass an exam with him and when you did it was with the lowest possible grade. My grandfather, Agide, had become famous in Florence for becoming the only student in living memory to pass an exam with Chiarugi with full marks with merit. He died according to family tradition, very young and of a heart attack. My mother turned to him in desperation when I was rushed to hospital at the age of two with a severe form of gastroenteritis. I was at the paediatric clinic at the University of Bologna where they discharged me saying there was nothing else they could do for me. My grandfather re-hydrated me and treated me by brewing drinks with medicinal plants and acacia honey. After a week I was in the clear. When I thought about him and his full marks in anatomy I was heavily discouraged. Luckily, the actual exam was preceded by less difficult ones: osteology, arthrology, myology, syndesmology, histology and cytology. In this way the impact with those five thousand pages was less intense.

I started out with a top grade with merit and the compliments of Professor Giacomo Azzali, who offered me the chance to be an intern student at the Institute of Anatomy. There were only four places and of course I accepted eagerly. I had a microscope all to myself, a long wooden counter full of a series of petri dishes, various coloring substances and chemical reagents for those techniques that identify the different tissues of the cells of the human body. I would stay until late at night working on exercises with the coloring substances after attending lesson in the morning. Professor Azzali, who was chief of the Histology Department, came from a farming family which lived in the town of San Secondo. He owned an old three-gear Fiat Balilla car with a door that would only stay closed with a piece of wire. Often in the evening we would face fog that you could cut with a knife and risk falling in the Po River to go and eat the best culatello in the world at the “Buca di Zibello” restaurant. Back then it was little more than a dive, but it would become famous in time.

The Histochemistry Department instead was run by Professor Azzali’s wife, Doctor Romita, who was rather full of herself, thinking she was particularly intelligent. Despite what she thought, she wasn’t able to finalize a technique for identifying two very important enzymes: alkaline and acid phosphatase. The coloring method that should have been used was the Lison-Gomori method, but, even following the timing for each of the many phases diligently, every attempt failed. For this reason Doctor Romita decided she needed to go directly to Lausanne, where Professor Lison was. I had also tried many times, to the best of my abilities, to identify the enzymes following all the reaction times described in the histochemistry book. In the end I decided to do something very simple: I started to randomly modify the times set out. I thought that was the only way we could start to see some results. Obviously the various possible combinations were so numerous that it would have taken a year to try them all out. So for two months I concentrated on changing the reaction times almost blundering in the dark.

One evening I was working late in the lab and keeping an eye on the clock because I didn’t want to miss the last bus when unexpectedly, looking at the last phase in the microscope my heart skipped a beat. The slide had finally turned black. I had identified the two enzymes. I was beside myself with joy.

There was a lot of talk about the discovery around the institute and Doctor Romita was disappointed that she wouldn’t get to go to Lausanne to learn the procedure from Professor Lison. Indeed, I had meticulously written down all the various changes to the reaction times in my notebook. For this reason she never missed a chance to take a shot at me. “Here comes the great scientist,” she would say. One day she asked me to clean her laboratory glassware. I knew that this was a very important task for the person who uses the glassware because, if it isn’t immaculately clean, any residue could affect the results of the reactions. Since she was also the wife of Professor Azzali who was a friend I respected, I accepted the task to keep the peace. However, when Doctor Romita ordered me to clean her glassware a second time, things went differently. I looked her calmly in the eyes and said: “Ma’am, the glassware is yours and you should clean it. I’d like to remind you that I am enrolled in the second year of medicine, not dishwashing.” After that she stopped annoying me and even speaking to me altogether.

As well as coloring the histological preparations, another task I had was to take care of the various “anatomical preparations”, which meant dissecting the various parts of a limb that the professor would need to explain to the anatomy class. There was also another task that the interns had and it was neither easy nor pleasant. The Anatomy and Physiology Department had a large holding pen to keep the animals that were used for experiments. There were guinea pigs, mice, hamsters, dogs, cats, bats and even a particular breed of monkey from Asmara. They were very intelligent and, to survive in captivity, they lived in pairs in their cages. They were strong and aggressive and would try to defend themselves from us, so we had to inject them with a substance called alloxan which neutralized the Langherans cells of the pancreas, thus inhibiting the production of insulin. Obviously, without this essential hormone the monkeys would contract diabetes. As if that wasn’t enough, we had to administer various kinds of anti-diabetic medicines with an IV drip to see which were the most effective. The only way to immobilize them without getting bitten was to catch them by surprise by trapping the tops of their heads. They soon caught on, however, and would stand back to back with their jaws menacingly open. The task was not only sickening, but also dangerous.

I passed the anatomy exam with flying colors, without, however, reaching my grandfather Agide’s score. I had already passed chemistry, physics, biology, and histology. Now I would have to take biochemistry, physiology and general pathology. In the third year I left the Institute of Anatomy, keeping on excellent terms with Professor Azzali who proudly considered me “one of his students.” He was always happy when I did well in my exams. Now I had a lot more time for myself, not having to color slides, prepare pieces of anatomy or even fight monkeys.

Not just blood tests

My course mates then were Giuseppe Pinto, a.k.a “Butt-cheek”, Giovanni Guareschi, a.k.a “Mangascià”, due to the fact that he looked like an Arab, and Luciano Berti, a.k.a. “Ciske the w…re. In the place where we lived in Viale Rustici number 10, we used to study all night, from nine p.m. to seven a.m. without interruption. I read out loud, repeating and asking myself if everything was clear. One of the course mates would often fall asleep and then, as well as getting heavily scolded, he might even have gotten a slap on the back of the head. At eight a.m. I was in the hospital, either in the clinics or at lessons, then I would get home at two p.m., eat, rest until seven p.m. and then, after what I called my little prisoner’s walk, I started studying for the night again. When I had a judo competition the timetable changed and I would start studying after midnight. Furthermore, as if I didn’t have enough on my plate, I started getting into university politics.

I had become the leader of one of the three non-religious university political organizations: the UGI (Italian Goliardic Student Union); the AGI (Association of Italian Goliardic Students) which included radicals, republicans and liberals of which I was a part; and the FUAN (University Federation of National Alliance). The religious “Intesa Cattolica” (Catholic) was the strongest, most numerous and richest coalition that, thanks to the support of the Church and the Christian Democrats, always won the elections with an absolute majority. In 1960 they won again, but without an absolute majority, so that they had to share some of the ministries with us of the AGI. These roles included the presidency, vice-presidency, the theater center, culture, press and sports. I was president of the university sports center (CUS), mostly funded by the Italian National Olympic Committee (CONI). The sports covered were volleyball, top division rugby, third series basketball, fencing and judo. The money was never enough and we had to bend over backwards and be very creative in order to scrape the funds together. I discovered that the CONI had set aside funds for 50 million Lira2 for a university organization that created a section for a new olympic event. I immediately thought of field hockey. I contacted the Italian federation which sent jerseys, shoes, sticks and all the other equipment we needed and I invited a top series coach from Bologna. I convinced my friends, even threatening or blackmailing them, to participate in the training. So the first field hockey section in an Italian University was created in Parma and this allowed us to get funds and solve more than a few problems. I even had a player from Virtus Bologna play for the basketball team by signing him up for a course on hydrocarbons. Meanwhile, by taking hours away from sleep I would study at night. Having passed both main exams of special pathology and surgical pathology I could now attend the second medical division, where there was a very good chief physician, Doctor Falzoi.

The injections and blood tests I performed there on the patients were at lot easier than the ones on the monkeys.

2 Approximately 543,000 dollars in 2016

Slivoviz on the veranda

In the summer of 1961 a scholarship from the SISM (International Union of Medical Students) allowed me to attend a large center which specialized in bone tuberculosis in Yugoslavia. They put me up in a hospital structure in a town in Croatia nestled on the cliffs overlooking the sea and I was even granted an allowance.

In the morning I followed the long operating sessions on patients’ bones and joints and in the afternoon I would follow the doctors as they made their rounds, coming into contact with a whole series of bone pathologies such as colitis and osteomyelitis which you didn’t often see in Italian hospitals and university clinics. I was particularly impressed by the very high level of preparation of the Slavic doctors and their knowledge of foreign languages and medical literature.

One evening I was invited to a party along with my Austrian colleague Hans Hermann and the German Dagmar Spitz. I was a bit hesitant to invite the attractive Dagmar to dance since I didn’t want to upset Hans who had quite a crush on her. At a certain point we got over the hesitation and embarrassment that left us the only ones sitting at a table. It was Hans who broke the silence, in Latin as was per usual, he said to me: “tibi pulsandum est tellus cum ea puella”3. This was a phrase from Tibullo, and it put an end to any chances that Hans may have had with the beautiful Dagmar.

In the hospital there were patients from all over Yugoslavia with tuberculosis of the bone. Its position on a cliff overlooking a crystal clear sea was the best thing for them according to the ideas of the time. I was always struck by the eyes of the young female patients who would keep staring at me. I imagine that since they had been hospitalized for months in some cases they were understandably aroused. Furthermore, there were ideas, also in Italy, about the strange effects of TBS on sexuality. Even in the operating room I was attracted to those beautiful Slavic eyes, the only thing visible over the paper masks. However, once the masks came off there was a lot of disappointment!

One evening the chief of the Orthopedics Department, who spoke fluent German, invited Dagmar out for a drink of slivovitz. The date took place on a beautiful veranda overlooking the sea not far from where Hans and I had our room so we could hear their conversation, which was sometimes interrupted by laughter and sometimes by suspicious silence. We were behaving like jealous husbands as we strained to eavesdrop on the conversation.

The chief physician didn’t sleep in the hospital but he had an apartment set aside in case he needed to stay overnight. With Dagmar we secretly took possession of it. One evening we heard knocking and then blows and kicks on the door for five long minutes. The chief didn’t invite Dagmar for a drink of Slivovitz after that. My experience in that hospital was, in more ways than one, a very positive one.

3 You have to dance with that girl.

Facts, not words

Once back in Italy I went back to my nighttime studying. During the day I was busy with university lessons, posters and flyers to prepare and a newsletter on which to plan the activities for the students. My policy was pragmatic, I kept my feet on the ground, no words, but facts.

I was looking into an issue that had long been put to one side, that of the students who didn’t live in Parma and the commuters who couldn’t afford the rent in the city. Whether they came from out of the province from Brescia or Cremona, or from Reggio Emilia or Guastalla, this group of students made up most of the approximately five thousand students at the University of Parma. They would go to cafes to try and write down some notes on lessons or study for upcoming exams amongst the noise of those who were chatting over a coffee or playing pool and they couldn’t stay too long without ordering something. To make matters worse, they would often have to put up with a cloud of cigarette smoke. What we needed were classrooms where these students could study in peace or rest as well as a university canteen where they could have a cooked meal at affordable prices. I also wanted the more deserving students whose parents had low incomes to have the chance to get food vouchers. I had already spoken about these issues I was promoting with the director of the university, Doctor Usberti and with the dean.

Once I had gotten over my youthful passion for Giuseppe Mazzini “Giovane Italia” style politics, my political views at the time could be described as “illuminated liberalism”, which moved between the teachings of Piero Gobetti and Gaetano Salvemini. The most important thing for me was improving the lives of students who came from out of town and, as a second priority, a reform of the Faculty of Medicine which hadn’t been updated since 1890. Diplomacy was not my strong point and more than once I was sued for telling or writing the truth. Since I didn’t fully adhere to the ideas of any party and I didn’t let them manipulate me, I was accused of sitting on the fence by my adversaries.

Meanwhile, I had taken up judo practice again in preparation for the national finals that were to take place in Bari, if I passed the regionals. That year, 1961, our student group AGI won by a landslide at the elections. We even obtained an absolute majority due to the elimination of the Catholic group because of procedural irregularities. I was awarded the presidency and my brothers, Franco and Muni, were assigned the culture ministry and a role in the theater organization. At this point, as well as fence-sitting, I was also accused of Kennedyism, something new to a non-religious movement.

I was elected to the national council for Parma, taking the place of Marco Pannella in the U.N.U.R.I which, in the sixties, was the national parliament of university students made up of twenty-one members. Parma only had the right to one representative, while other larger organizations with ten or fifteen thousand students had two or three. In truth the U.N.U.R.I. was subject to a very strong political influence. Bettino Craxi had been its president while Giorgio La Malfa, Marco Pannella and Achille Ochetto had all been members. I had met the latter in Rimini, he who would later have created “the glorious war machine”.4 His political ideas were completely different from mine, but I respected him for his culture, his level of preparation and his honesty. I really felt out of place. I wasn’t interested in political battles, but in improving the conditions of as many students as possible. That is why I had been elected, for the solidity and pragmatism of my program and for my perceived honesty. The national U.N.U.R.U.I congress was to be held in Rome over three days. In my opinion, the only topic on the program that was of any interest to the students was the round table on the reform of the Faculty of Medicine. I had studied it in depth and I was eager to participate despite the organizational difficulties it would cause me. Indeed the congress was to finish the evening before the regional judo championships in Modena.

During the congress the round table on the Faculty of Medicine reform that so many had wished for was cancelled. I was furious. I immediately got in touch with Siro Brondoni, a high-level representative of the F.U.C.I. of the University of Milan, asking him for an explanation. He informed me that the round table had been cancelled to allow an emergency meeting to evaluate the position of the university students on the developing Cuban situation. It was1962 and Cuba was the center of a complicated issue that could have meant a break-out of war between the USA and the USSR. Having heard the reasons for the cancellation, I answered that the students who had elected me weren’t interested in the Cuban problem. Brondoni answered that I was not a politician, but a technician. “Yes, I’m a technician.” I answered, to which he replied: “God deliver us from technicians!” I didn’t beat around the bush, “I’ll free you from the technicians!” Indeed I felt that things were not quite completely above board in this environment. In those days you could see important politicians speaking to some of the more representative members of the U.N.U.R.I national council. Among these politicians was the socialist Lelio Basso, who was encouraging the U.N.U.R.I to form a coalition government between the Christian Democrats and the socialist and communists, in line with the plans laid out by Aldo Moro for the national Christian Democrat party congress to be held in Naples. He then could have stated that the university students, who were the future of the country, had already made that same choice in the U.N.U.R.I. their national parliament. I didn’t like the idea of being used in this way and I decided to resign. I left Rome that very evening and took the train to Modena.

I travelled standing all the way with a second class ticket. I arrived at four in the morning, tired, disheartened and disappointed. Since I could have done with three hours’ sleep, I found a cheap hotel near the station. Unfortunately the cheap hotel was really a noisy brothel with prostitutes and clients coming and going. I didn’t sleep a wink. I was also obsessed by the idea that I was overweight for my judo category and if that had been the case I would have been in trouble. In the morning I had a look at myself in he mirror. I didn’t like what I saw: bags under my eyes, an unshaven face and hair that should have been cut at least two months before. Also, one of my ankles was still hurting from a recent sprain. I bandaged my ankle with a kind of tensoplast tape and got to the weighing-in at half past seven. The scales were in my favor and I was within the limits. I was no longer tired, no longer in a bad mood and the pain from my ankle and the diarrhea from a laxative pill I had taken the evening before were forgotten.

To understand the events of the morning that followed I need to point something out. Even though I was the president of the Parma university students and ex president of the Parma CUS sport organization, I was participating with a sports club from Bologna, the “Judo Club Feslineo”. The trainer of this club, my first black-belt judo master, Zanatta, had grown tired of commuting from Bologna to Parma and had resigned from the post. Antonio Schioppa, a black-belt master from the police corps was chosen in his place. I didn’t feel I had much to learn from him, so for three months, three times a week, I went by train to Bologna. I would get back to Parma at around two in the morning and would have to walk several miles, often in the snow, because there were no taxis at that hour. Master Zanatta trained me for free, but in exchange he wanted me to compete with the Bologna Judo Club.

The sport arena was packed and I put my adversaries away in the early stages with great ease. I ended up in the final with the favorite of the Modena girls. They called him Jimmy and when he was introduced the Modena girls in the first row shouted out: “Jimmy you’re a god!” He definitely wasn’t a god, but he moved like an eel. Finally, after a half point I was able to get him on the ground and pin him. He tried to roll over pulling up his collar to his ears to protect his neck, but he moved too late. I had moved faster putting my thumbs under the collar and started with the choke-hold. In these cases the victim of the choke-hold has to hit the ground with his hand to signal that he gives up. If they can’t use their hands, they can use a foot. If neither happens, and it is rare because survival instinct is strong even in idiots, then the judge has to step in. In our case the judge was Antonio Schioppa who couldn’t stand me. Schioppa, for some reason, didn’t stop the match as he should have done and declare my victory and Jimmy didn’t show any sign of giving up. I really couldn’t understand why the judge wouldn’t intervene. In the end he only ended the match when Jimmy lay unconscious and blue in the face on the tatami. The audience was furious. I got up calmly and made my way back to the corner, putting my judogi straight and waiting to be declared the winner. Meanwhile they were trying to wake Jimmy with little slaps in the face and breathing salts and any other idea that came to them. I was oblivious to the insults that were being hurled at me as I already saw myself competing for the Italian title in Bari. Then someone starting questioning the moral values of my mother. I turned around and saw a fat guy along with the usual row of girls, all participating in the chorus of insults. That’s when I went and did something I should never have done. Perhaps it was because I was tired, or maybe the lack of sleep or the strict diet, but I couldn’t resist the impulse to answer the insults against my mother that were getting under my skin. I turned my back on Schioppa and said: “Listen you big eunuch, when I get off of this mat I’m gonna make your face look like raw meat”, then to the girls I said: “Go and get screwed under the Panaro bridge!”

It was exactly what Antonio Schopppa was waiting for. Despite the fact that I had won the tournament I was disqualified for unsportsmanlike conduct towards the audience. I thought of how all the sacrifices and effort I had made had been for nothing. That was how an activity that had lasted eight years finished. I didn’t want to go through another year of training and commuting on the train to Bologna and I couldn’t go to Parma because I would come face to face with the pathetic man who was Antonio Schioppa. Wondering why Jimmy hadn’t hit or kicked on the mat to give up, I thought of Sirchio. Naturally I hadn’t behaved that way, but the thought of him improved my mood for a little while.

4 The transformation of the Italian Communist Party into the Democratic Left Party

Not by force, but by art

The Sirchio bothers were huge men of incredible strength. They were metalworkers and enjoyed playing unpleasant tricks on people. One day they lifted up a Fiat Topolino car with the driver still inside. They put the car with its driver on a bar table and the poor man didn’t dare come out for fear of tilting the car over. This was one of the many anecdotes of their strength that went around. The brothers were physically identical and practiced wrestling in a club that had closed due to lack of funds. That is why one of the two decided to sign up for judo. He was quite a sight at two hundred and seventy-five pounds of muscle.

Around eleven p.m. Master Zanatta would leave to head back to Bologna and we were allowed to stay in the gym until midnight. Sometimes, with the instructor gone, there were scenes worthy of the old west. I asked if anyone wanted to do a “randori” and Sirchio stood up to his full height making everybody laugh. I was an orange belt, while he was still only a white belt. At that time judo was quite new to Italy and so there was often a group of onlookers to observe this new martial art. Sirchio, towering over me, wanted to cash in on the comic moment and started to make fun of me saying: “Bring it on little man! Show me what your fancy belt can do against my strength!” He lifted me up and started to play around with me. He kept me on tiptoe so I couldn’t react, moving me around the floor like a puppet with violent jerks that hurt my neck, the collar was biting into my skin and I could feel blood trickling down my back. It was as if I had been put in the stocks. I had become the butt of Sirchio’s joke to entertain the onlookers who were laughing as if to emphasise the fact that, even in judo, technique was nothing against sheer strength. I was tempted to give up the match which had quickly turned into a farce, but my usual stupid pride didn’t let me. I hoped that, despite his strength, he wouldn’t be able to keep me hanging indefinitely. He mistreated me for fifteen long minutes and I was just about to lose hope when he had a moment of distraction and let go of my collar, allowing me to put my heels on the ground. I faked an O. Goshi, in which you use your side and grab the belt, to the left, knowing that it wouldn’t have effect, but he took the bait and moved clumsily to the right. He suddenly found himself thrown to the mat. He didn’t have time to exhale as he went down so he got the breath knocked out of him and lay there trying to breath. I was on him in a second with a kesa-katamè hold, which he tried to get out of by pushing on my chin. I pretended to resist and he fell for it, pushing even harder. I quickly moved my head and his arm slid down my neck. At this point the cat and mouse game was over because I was in the perfect position to use his own arm as a lever without him being able to resist my hold. Seeing that he had lost, Sirchio started to beat on the mat with his left hand, then with his feet and he finally lost consciousness, going blue in the face. Technique had beaten brute strength. The small crowd of onlookers had stopped laughing and fallen completely silent. My judogi jacket was bloodied due to the cuts caused by my collar. Under the shower I felt exhausted, but satisfied.