Hernia Repair 2005
The “Association Hernia Repair 2005” was established in 2004 for the management of the 27th International Congress of the European Hernia Society, whose presidency was given to doctor Andrea Coda and it took place in Turin from 1st to 3rd December 2005.
We wanted to create an association whose purpose is to promote and organize medical and informative meetings instead of a precise committee and then use the knowledge acquired in the organization of such an important congress. In fact in 2006 a minor event was programmed for 24th November, a regional event, but still quite important and this was the first Piedmont Regional Congress by SICOP, the association for the surgeons of the private hospital sector.
The well knows facts coming from the financial law of the Prodi government, have denied a continuous in 2007 with another event, but the commitment of “Hernia Repair 2005” and its President is to return in the next years, other important surgeon’s meetings in our city.
This site is the evidence of the work carried out by the Association with the memory of all that’s been done and of everyone who contributed to the success of these meetings, but also the activity presentation of its President Andrea Coda whose patient and constant work of many years enabled him to be honoured, in Amsterdam in 2002 with the Presidency by the Board of the European Hernia Society of a Congress that was held in Italy only 4 times before. (twice in Milan, once in Naples and Palermo). Turin, on this occasion, came after Prague 2004 and before Athens 2007, because in 2006 there was the Joint Meeting EHS-AHS in Boston.
Historical Curiosity
The head offices of the Association “Hernia Repair 2005”, located in Via Carlo Alberto, 6 in Turin, has the same building and apartment that, for a few months, from 8 April 1888, belonged to the German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900).
His apartment cost, furnished, 30 liras a month, and it was owned by Davide and Candida Fino, the managers of the newspaper shop in the square.
It was in this house that the philosopher wrote the book of his life, ‘Ecce homo’ and here he finished Der Antichrist. Nietzsche, as we know from his writings, was literally in love with the Turin atmosphere: “What a dignified, austere city!” was said by the writer. He lived in Turin for 6 months, from 5 April to 5 June 1888 and then from 21 September to the beginning of 1889.
Here he started, in January 1889, to show severe signs of mental instability. On 3 January Nietzsche, after leaving the house, saw a coachman whipping and kicking his horse. “You, inhuman slaughterer of horse!” shouted the enraged philosopher and then he kissed and hugged the horse.
His friend Overbeck, professor of theology, went to collect him and took him back to Basel, and then to Jena where he was admitted for over a year to a hospital for diseases of the nervous system.
The last message he wrote in his room overlooking Piazza Carlo Alberto, before being dragged away by his friend was: “Sing me a new hymn: the world is transfigured and all heaven is "rejoicing”, ‘The Crucifix’.
Nietzsche left Turin for good 9 January 1889 at 14.20. As it is remembered in the tombstone situated in Via Carlo Alberto, prepared by the writer Rubino for the centennial of his birth and placed in 1944 during the German domination and never removed. Nietzsche “knew the fullness of the spirit that temp the unknown, the will of dominant that create the hero”.
Nietzsche loved the severity and elegance of the “portico” of Turin, the mirrors, where he often saw his image reflected, the tapestries and decorations of the “plafond” of the ancient Rococo style cafes, the squared marble pavements of the insides and the streets.
He was a great admirer of the architect Alessandro Antonelli (1789-1888) who in his old age was finishing the construction of the Mole (176,5 metres in height), a building without a specific purpose, but created to be very tall, with strange and disturbing shapes so much that the philosopher went as far as identifying it in Zarathustra.
“Just a minute ago I passed the Mole Antonelliana, the most ingenious building ever built, - strange, it doesn’t have a name yet – for an absolute impulse towards the sky, - it doesn’t remind you of anything but my Zarathustra. I have baptized him “Ecce homo” and I have surrounded him in my spirit with an immense free space”.
Nietzsche must have captured the inner craziness of the Mole. Antonelli started it in 1863 but for at least ten years, he had his dream inside his heart: building the tallest brick building in the world. During the years, Antonelli didn’t care much about the destination of the Mole (first a synagogue, then a national museum); he only cared that it would grow a little bit every day.
In its uselessness, there are no doubts: it is easy to imagine the old architect laughing while its creature goes up into the sky. Nietzsche knew this and was fascinated by it. In the Twilight of the idols, written in Turin, he underlines that the architect “must make visible the pride, the victory over gravity, the will for power: he had the Mole in mind.
And an echo of the Mole can be also found when Nietzsche writes, in the pamphlet against Wagner, that the art we need must be “deriding, light, aloof, divinely undisturbed, divinely ingenious, just like a live fire burns in a cloudless sky”.
Misunderstood and mostly ignored by Turin people, the Mole hit the feverish imagination of Nietzsche like a revelation: and if in the well built order of the city he could find the peace of his last season, the Mole must have appeared to him the happy extravaganza of an accomplice, a friend.
"What is happiness? The feeling of growing power, that we are overcoming an obstacle.. "
The Antichrist, 1888, 2