Savona. Few people know that the city of the Torretta hosts the first museum in Italy within a medical practice, thanks to the passion and dedication of the doctor Alberto Macciu.
Born and raised in Savona, he is considered one of the greatest experts, even at an international level, on diseases of the lymphatic circulation. The one set up in Piazza Santa Cecilia, strongly desired by the surgeon, is a completely unique museum: “Only myself and another doctor in Alabama have a museum inside the office – states Macvò – there is a story about museum therapy in fact, just think that in Turin they put doctors’ offices inside the Egyptian museum because there is a very alternative theory which states that if people are examined in a comfortable environment they do better. And then I thought why don’t I put a museum in my house? And from the moment I felt like it, I literally started collecting like crazy.”
Over 1000 objects to take on an imaginary journey through medicine. A practice that receives patients from all over Italy but also from France and Australia, a place that must also be a cultural and educational environment. A way to “break away” from the illness for a few moments, laugh and have a new approach to treatment: “The museum has been open for a year, but I have been collecting for much longer. In the last period, however, I had a place to physically put these objects and so I started visiting the second-hand markets even more”.
There are more particular and unique objects that concern the world of medicine: from amputation saws (found in a market near Brescia), to vials of mercury, passing through the display case dedicated to anesthesia or the cauterization area or all the systems with which surgeons stopped the bleeding: “I travel to markets all over Europe, from Italy to London via Spain – says Macvò – I buy objects that would otherwise be lost, let’s give value back to things that people don’t give value to. Just think that I paid €30 for the saws, on collectors’ sites they are worth 800″.
“Patients come and go, it’s not my private collection. The object I am most attached to? To a book from 1640 by Doctor Aselli and signed by two of his students: in this text there is the discovery of the lymphatic vessels. The University of Pavia where he taught asked me for it but I guard it jealously, not so much for its economic value but rather for its emotional value”.
