by Francesca Navari October 25, 2025
FORTE DEI MARMI
The shining eyes of the baby just awakened from anesthesia. And that large rooster given by a father as a token of gratitude for saving his little girl. Unforgettable flashes of distant people and cultures, etched in the mind of Bruno Murzi, pediatric cardiac surgeon and mayor of Forte dei Marmi, recently returned from a mission in Eritrea with the team of the Monasterio Foundation and Mission Bambini, the Milan-based organization handling the logistics. Among the latest successful cases is that of two nine-month-old twins who underwent emergency surgery for a heart defect for which no one in Eritrea had been able to diagnose. Murzi decides that the procedure cannot be postponed. At his side is Vera Cetera, pediatric cardiac surgeon at Monasterio: thus the little girls enter the operating room and the heart defect is corrected.
Since 2005, Murzi has traveled twice a year with a team of twenty people (surgeons, technicians, and nurses) to Asmara to the International Operation Center for Children, a renovated pavilion of an old Italian hospital built in the 1930s. Out there, countless mothers, with ivory skin and an unstoppable faith in those "angels" who come to restore hope to their little ones, wait. "Twenty years ago," the surgeon-mayor recounts, "my colleagues and I were on a plane headed to Yemen and met an Italian-Eritrean gentleman who told us about the magic of Asmara and the needs of its people. We were so intrigued that we booked a ticket and, on an adventurous journey, went to Eritrea, where a group of German doctors were already performing heart surgery on children and asked us to collaborate. Each visit, we stayed for a fortnight and operated on 20-25 children, compared to the 300 reported by the local doctor in charge of preventive ultrasounds. A procedure lasts 4-5 hours, and it's not possible to perform more than three a day. Moreover, we bring the equipment from Italy because that facility has nothing. There are only four beds in intensive care, no MRIs, and in these settings, personal medical knowledge is the most effective tool. Yet the results of that small cardiac surgery hospital today are in line with the European average."
Sleepless nights and hard work intertwine with the gradual discovery of a wonderful humanity. Which, it must be said, is a panacea for the heart. "I remember a young man who came from 300 kilometers away," adds the doctor, "with his son who had Ebstein's disease and was dying. In two hours we took him to the operating room for the first of a series of operations necessary for that heart condition: today that patient is 14 years old and comes back to visit us. Another father whose little girl we saved gave us a rooster that we named Ugo, and it remained as our mascot for 10 years. But I will also never forget the dialogue of a beggar woman who spoke our language and who, late at night, told us, astounding us, how wonderful the times were when the Italians were here." What still drives you to put the white coat back on, now that you're retired? "The pleasure of feeling useful in a place where people smile. And where what you receive is more important than what you give."
