Rizzo's goodbye, the super eye specialist of the bionic eye, leaves Tuscany

After the escape of many luminaries, Florence loses the largest He won the competition from primary to the Gemelli of Rome. The only thing missing is its "catholicity". Its the first artificial retina implant in the world

In 2011 he returned shapes and outlines to the retinas of a Prato man who had become blind by experimenting with what until then was almost only a suggestion from a science fiction novel: he implanted the first bionic eye in the world, and all the eyes of the world ended up in Tuscany. In his field, he is a star. Awarded two years later as the most innovative surgeon on the planet at the Alfred Mann Foundation Awards in Los Angeles, his colleagues call him "the robot": he leaves everyone stunned – patients and doctors – for the speed of diagnosis, the photographic memory on the clinical picture of those who are in treatment even months after the last check, a hand with cybernetic precision and a religious resistance and devotion in the operating room.

In short, no one who had had this Messi in medicine as a team would have let him escape without a fight. And so it was. Yet no one has succeeded in restraining Stanislaus Rizzo. The Cosentino super ophthalmologist, after 27 years of career (22 spent in Pisa, the last five in Florence), leaves the Tuscan health service. Arrived in Careggi in November 2014, not without friction and controversy, even political, in the endless derby between the city of the Tower that had let it slip and that of the magic lily that had caught him, this giant of ophthalmic surgery has just won the competition announced months ago by the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart for perhaps the most prestigious chair in our country, the one from primary ophthalmology to the Gemelli polyclinic in Rome. He will be the successor of Professor Aldo Caporossi. Once the Sienese luminary retired, Rizzo also inherited his ranking in the international rankings: the summit.

Needless to say, for the University of Florence, Careggi and the regional health system this is a serious breach, the most painful in the string of cases of "escape of the big" that for two years have been filling the chronicles of the Florentine hospital so much that they have transformed the phenomenon into a journalistic genre: the orthopedist Rodolfo Capanna has gone from there (but at least to Cisanello); then he won a primary post at the San Camillo in Rome the hematologist Luigi Rigacci; the breast surgeon Carlo Mariotti, who landed in Florence in September 2017, took off a few months later. And now the magician of liver transplants Paolo Muiesan – sick of waiting for an agreement between Florence and Pisa – could go back to Birmingham.

"There is still no definitive certainty, since Rizzo has surpassed – hands down, of course – the scientific investigation resulting in the winner of a selection which was attended by all the major luminaries of the sector, but not yet the exam on his "Catholicity" », they tell from the Florentine polyclinic. A kind of proof in which you prove that you are a believer. Obviously, almost a formality. So much so that at Careggi they are already prepared to greet him by the end of the year and to launch a competition for the succession. To which Fabrizio Giansanti, his dolphin and pupil, certainly aims. Yes, because Rizzo will not drain Careggi by having his entire team follow him. For the magician of the 63-year-old bionic eye, the Gemini is the crowning achievement of a career, where no one can challenge his fame and gains through his profession (in 2017 he totaled 1.7 million euros) as a success in Tuscany. He would have liked to stay, but for at least two years the climate on his name has been poisoned, particularly due to the controversy over the collaboration with the San Rossore clinic in Pisa. Almost an exception for the rules of intramoenia, of which the governor Enrico Rossi dreams of abolition, but allowed Rizzo to Pisa by a resolution of the general direction of Careggi precisely in an attempt to convince him to stay.

Rizzo became full professor this year, but in just a few months in 2014 the Florentine general hospital carried out a 4 million euro project at the CTO, an international center: 3 operating theaters 6 days out of 7 for all diseases, from glaucoma to corneal transplantation, up to retinal operations. A structure that has been caring for 12,000 people since its landing, grinding 60,000 services and 4,000 complex operations per year. To get the full picture of what Tuscany will lose, just think that since 2011 Rizzo already has more than 300 artificial retina implants on patients who have become blind due to retinitis pigmentosa, a rare genetic disease. Not to mention that a terrifying story circulates around the Gemelli contest to frame its scientific stature: it is said that the selection went a long way because it was "boycotted" by the inner circle of the Roman ophthalmology, frightened by its arrival so much that for months the Catholic struggled to find doctors willing to form the examination commission and indeed had to turn to an Israeli to close it. Now the magician of the bionic eye will no longer magnetize the eyes of the world on Tuscany, but on Rome. –