The first kids at the Calcit market, which returned this morning – 12 May – to Arezzo with the seventieth edition, are now in their sixties, the grandparents or almost now of the children and teenagers who have crowded together since the early hours along the stalls of a road axis (obviously closed to traffic) that crosses the city center from one side to the other.
A ritual that is repeated from generation to generation at least once a year, sometimes twice, an almost unique example of social solidarity and community commitment for 46 years, during which Arezzo has changed and Italy has changed: it was 1978 of terrorism and the Moro kidnapping, we are in the third millennium of artificial intelligence.
Only they, the boys, have not changed in their purpose: raise money, lots of money, for the fight against cancer, to equip public healthcare with cutting-edge equipment that would otherwise be difficult to pay for, especially in provincial hospitals.
A story of alliance between public and private which started almost by chance and which today is one of the pillars of the south-east ASL in the Arezzo area, blessed by two presidents of the republic, Sandro Pertini and then Oscar Luigi Scalfaro and also by the Popes who have followed one another since Wojtyla forward, always ready to receive those kids who like little ants collect euro by euro the funds to be allocated to the anti-cancer battle: 35 million in almost half a century at current valueis the estimate made by the president of Calcit Giancarlo Sassoli, successor of the founder of the autonomous committee for the fight against tumors (acronym Calcit precisely) Gianfranco Barulli.
He was a merchant, Barulli, owner of one of the most famous jewelers in the center of Arezzo. She had to face the fight against cancer firsthand when she had to care for a brother-in-law who had fallen ill. The usual tour from one hospital to another, from one specialized center to another, with the observation that the most modern instruments had to be looked for outside Arezzo, because local healthcare (it was the era of the transition to healthcare reform) was not he could allow them. Hence the idea of involving the private sector: we will give you a hand, was Barulli’s intuition, as long as the others do not have to face the inconveniences of my brother-in-law in half of Europe.
Said and done: created by a few friends in a small room in Piazza San Iacopo, where he had the shop, Calcit was born.
But how can we actually raise the necessary funding? He has the right intuition Franco Palazzinigoldsmith designer and cartoonist, a volcano of projects: Let’s have a kids’ market, we are looking for volunteers willing to host a flea market whose proceeds will go to charity. That same year the first edition: a few stalls, still in Piazza San Iacopo, bringing in the first money.
An initiative that has grown dramatically from year to year, far exceeding the founders’ expectations. The first boys, and then those who came later, continued with the same spirit: first they emptied attics and homes of what the people of Arezzo were willing to donate (clothes, shoes, books, toys, modern antiques), then they resell everything on the docks to other fellow citizens, who buy partly because they find good opportunities and partly because they too put their heart into it. An average market gathers a few hundred stations, behind which there are up to a thousand children, together with adults obviously, for a profit that rarely falls below one hundred thousand euros and sometimes much exceeds it.
A success that knows no end and which was already such in the mid-80s, when President Pertini came to inaugurate the first oncology center built with Calcit money, in the spaces of the old hospital of Santa Maria sopra i Ponti, in a riot of children’s flags, a real crowd for the elderly head of state.
In 1993 the hospital moved to the new location in San Donato: a new cancer center needs to be built and another president Scalfaro comes to lay the first stone. There are also repeated audiences with the Popes in St. Peter’s Square.
Since then there has been no anti-cancer instrumentation, from CT scans to PET scans and the most complex and innovative machinery to which Calcit has not made its contribution. They are always behind it, the kids from the market, which change from year to year but without changing their spirit. A true initiation rite into community life: they learn that the common good is as valuable as selfish interests, Arezzo becomes a model in the battle against unforgiving evil.
