Venice: farewell to Doctor Cipolla, the clown doctor who made young and old smile
Doctor Cipolla always went around with a pad in his hand, to go through the list of names of angels, he said. “It is up to me to go … ah no, nothing, don’t you ghe yes (you’re not there)”. And down to laugh. Thus, in dialect, she gave the good news to the old men who were waiting for her in the retirement home, even that was not the right day to be sent to the Creator. «He knew how to laugh at everything, he even joked about the most terrible things, he who had a subtlety of mind and an immense heart. And instead – remembers Manuela Polacco, a clown colleague of all time – on the morning of Wednesday 23 March the name among the angels was just yours ».
He was 59 years old
Doctor Cipolla, aka Attilio Niero, at the age of 59 left, leaving everyone with a smile. Miranese, known throughout Venice for his vocation as a doctor clown, on 25 September celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the Il Piccolo Principe association, founded by Manuela Polacco, full of the experience of determining doctor clowns, and of which Attilio Niero he was president for fifteen years. “We were pioneers – explains Manuela – we met at a party at an association and we never left each other with The Little Prince: Attilio was in love with this experience, he said that it had changed his daily life, he thanked him for it”. Gruff and frank as only sincere people can be, he had the super power of hugs, “in a physical and human sense” his colleagues recall, capable as he was of embracing the whole world, especially if suffering and sick: “A bear with good face and an immense heart ».
The memory of colleagues
In fact, not everyone is capable of being clown doctors. It is not a question of sympathy, nor of making people laugh: «To know how to joke about everything you have to look at reality without staying on the surface. We must grasp the beauty that is hidden in every moment of life, and grasp it deeply. To be a doctor clown you need a head and a heart. And Attilio had them both », Manuela Polacco says,« you have to want to get involved. Being a Doctor Clown, as with all forms of volunteering, does not mean giving you something left over. The point is to meet the other. Doctor Cipolla’s secret was to be in love with simplicity. He was not a diplomat, but he was a man of infinite tenderness, of great charisma ». Training, study and publishing did the rest, for him who in his life was a worker got sick, and transformed himself in front of the sick, the parents of children with severe deficits, the terminally ill.
A smile for everyone
There was not so much child, old or sick that could not receive his smile, since the days of the old hospital in Mestre Umberto I where the experience of the Little Prince began. In order to describe it, Doctor Cipolla had used the words by inventing a song: “You with a red nose dressed as a doctor … you don’t realize that your mask absorbs the pain.”
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March 25, 2022 (change March 25, 2022 | 20:11)
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