Gentlemen,    
I had the opportunity to be a guest of your facility [...] from 24/08/2010 to 08/09/2010 for an advanced lung cancer.
For twenty-five years my profession (I work for a company that markets products for analysis laboratories) has constantly brought me into contact with Italian healthcare, experiencing its slow and constant decline in many aspects day after day.
Inefficiency, degradation, opportunism, indifference, superficiality, arrogance, careerism are just some of the adjectives that I feel like using to describe what I have experienced in recent years every time I set foot in a public laboratory or had to deal with the administration hospital.
The illness that struck me so subtly and suddenly at just fifty-one years of age offered me the chance to experience a different type of healthcare.
In the department where I was hospitalized I found qualified medical staff, always ready and willing to give exhaustive and polite answers to patients and relatives of any class and cultural background. The nursing staff, although clearly understaffed, did their utmost at all hours to alleviate the inconveniences of the disease, always with courtesy and a smile. The nursing students, with the enthusiasm and strength of young people, brought a wind of serenity to all of us sick people every day. The services offered by the auxiliary staff made the hospitalization more similar to a hotel stay than to a hospital stay.
And finally a superlative general efficiency (I underwent a skull MRI at 18.30pm!). All this makes me happy and hopeful not only because Italian healthcare can function differently, but above all because all of Italy can be better.
Faced with the collapse of public life in recent days, knowing that there are people like all of you gives great moral and spiritual strength to those like me who have been affected by the disease.
But not only!
Without any rhetoric, I would like to affirm and agree that you are the best part of this country. You are the Italy that all of us citizens would like and deserve to have, despite the empty rhetoric that we are forced to hear every day from the politicians on duty. I don't know if I will be able to defeat the evil that has struck me, but I am sure that with you our country, starting with healthcare, can be better.
Thank you again for everything you are and what you do.
With gratitude     

Letter from Ernesto Lorenzetti to the doctors of the Oncology Centre

This letter was written by Ernesto, another young Guanellian cooperator after a very challenging experience in a Roman hospital, where alongside painful cases of poor healthcare, there is also a secret fabric of good relationships.
Ernesto lived his Christian life with commitment, he motivated his faith in Jesus with a thesis on the anthropological vision of Don Guanella.
Ernesto was called to enter the Kingdom of the righteous in recent months and looks down on us to help us live our experience of faith with trust and serenity.
God never abandons anyone.