Pancalli: “Thanks to Maglio, Italy has changed, disabled by a request for charity at the Paralympics”

Antonio Maglio “was also an extraordinary politician because he understood how to exploit the Rome 1960 Games, which makes him an extraordinary politician with a capital P. Today we live in another Italy”, after an era in which “the disabled were those who asked for charity on the parvises of the churches. Today is another story, which comes from the seed sown in those years “. This was stated by the president of the Paralympic Committee, Luca Pancalli, who spoke at the event organized by Inail on the figure of the doctor who first, and in the 1950s, understood that sport could help disabled people to return to life in their own right. in society. When Maglio started, Pancalli recalls, ‘there were people abandoned in the chronic care units, with a plaster bust on them. He was a visionary saying ‘no, they can’t die of septicemia, of sores’, and he brought them back to life. And he did more: he gave a value to the life and dignity of the human being “. At that time” it was a challenge: to stimulate a body that at the time was a bit consolidated. Also challenge the public administration machine in something extremely innovative. Today we live in another Italy: in 2000 we recovered the relationship with Inail, most of our athletes who win are prosthetic in Budrio, we have campuses and start-up centers. We want to produce awareness of the right to sport. The intuition of the ’60s concludes Pancalli – it returned to modernity in 2022. Maglio is certainly to be ascribed to those who dreamed, and we have carried that dream forward “.