Last week I spent part of my day helping to carry an 81
year-old man on a stretcher down a narrow flight of stairs. Not an easy task,
but it certainly wasn’t made any easier by the fact that he’d broken his hip.
None of the other stretcher-bearers, two of whom were proper paramedics and one
of whom was a passer-by like myself, spoke much English but between us we
managed to get the old guy to the waiting ambulance.
This incident took place in San Gimignano, an old hill-town
in Tuscany
that is famous for its white wine and its medieval towers. In fact, one of
those towers was the reason why the old man found himself strapped to a
stretcher and being carried out to an ambulance. He was part of a tour group
that had a couple of hours free in San Gimignano before their coach was due to
take them to Siena for the evening, and being an active person even in his
early eighties he’d wanted to climb the tower of the Palazzo Comunale, which is
called the Torre Grossa (great tower) on account of it being the highest of the
town’s fourteen remaining towers.
As for me, I was in San Gimignano as part of a week-long
holiday with my wife and mother-in-law. We were staying in Panzano, a hill-top
village located in the heart of Chianti country between Florence
and Siena which
is best-known for its butcher, of whom more in a later post. We were on a day
trip to San Gimignano, which Allison and I visited on a holiday to Tuscany
last year on our way to the airport at Pisa,
which had almost ended in disaster as we mis-calculated the time it would take
to drive back to the airport! This time, though, we allowed ourselves as much
of the day as we wanted to explore, safe in the knowledge that there was no
time-limit on getting back to our hired apartment.
In wanting to ‘do’ the tower, I was on my own. We’d looked
around the church with its lavish frescoes of scenes from the Bible, the
martyrdom of St Sebastian and Taddeo di Bartolo’s gruesome depiction of the
Last Judgement. We’d had a coffee in the main square – by now, I was getting
used to the Italian concept of not drinking milk in my coffee after breakfast.
As Allison and her mother didn’t fancy climbing the tower and I wasn’t particularly
inclined to go shopping, we split up after finding a reasonably-priced enoteca that had been listed in the
guide-book and where we agreed to meet for lunch in an hour’s time.
Getting into the tower wasn’t easy – I was kept waiting out
in the rain due to a ‘staff change’, and I spent the time chatting to an
Australian woman in her sixties called Francine who also wanted to climb the
tower. She was with a tour group which had started a couple of days previously
in Rome and had moved up to Tuscany. One of her group, Bert the Kiwi,
was older than the rest by several years but was by far the most physically
active, and had already gone over to the tower which he also wanted to climb;
in fact, Francine’s main reason for coming to the tower was that if an 81
year-old man could do it, so could she.
Anyway, we were eventually allowed in and after paying our €5
and taking a cursory look at the museum (more religious artwork) we headed for
the tower.
On our approach to the barrier before the serious part of
the ascent began, I was rather surprised to see someone lying down on the
floor. Maybe he was taking a breather, I thought. But no. He was obviously in
some considerable pain – and Francine immediately recognised him as Bert, the
81 year-old Kiwi.
The lady who operated the barrier was in a fluster, as you’d
expect. Bert was still conscious and he reckoned he’d broken his hip – he’d
slipped on the last step while coming down from the tower. An ambulance was on
its way, and as there was nothing much that Francine and I could do, the woman
gestured that we should carry on and make our way up the tower.
We made it to the top without any difficulty, apart from a
bit of a squeeze getting onto the viewpoint itself. Once there, we were treated
to a fantastic panorama of San Gimignano and the surrounding countryside. Tuscany looks great even
when it’s raining.
Most of the towers in Sam Gimignano are privately owned and
so are not open to the public. Even so, I was a little taken aback to find that
they are in effect private roof-gardens! Now I don’t know about you, but that
seems like going to great lengths to have a beer in the sun. That said, the
houses in the town are packed in so closely no-one has an actual garden, so I
suppose the lucky few who own the towers are making the best of it. I would say
something about the privacy but there’s not much of that given that the
tourists can all gawp at you from the Torre Grossa.
Descending was fairly straightforward, but given what had
happened to Bert we both took our time. When we got down to the barrier, the
operator was gesticulating at me and saying something.
I couldn’t understand what she was saying – although I’ve
recently taken an Italian class, I don’t think we covered what to do in an
emergency situation – but it was pretty clear that as an able-bodied male, my
help was needed to carry the stretcher down the last couple of flights of
stairs to the waiting ambulance in the square.
So that’s what I did. Luckily the other stretcher bearers
(two guys from the ambulance and another passer-by) spoke better English than I
can speak Italian so we were able to co-ordinate ourselves, and although those
staircases were tight, we made it down to terra firmer without inflicting any
further pain on poor old Bert.
The ambulance was waiting to take him away, along with his
wife who looked pretty shaken up. Francine went off to join the rest of her
tour group, who had just been informed of what had happened to one of their
number.
And me? By now, I was late for lunch, so I made my way to
the enoteca.
