30 thousand lire a year spent on health care
Spedale in Carmignano: the forewarning and the epilogue On September 26th, 1900 not even two months after the attempt on the King of Italy’s life in Monza, the city council of Carmignano decided to allocate the sum of “500 lire for five years and subsequently of 1,000 lire each year for the construction of the Spedale Umberto I “. It was not the first time that the idea of building a hospital had appeared in the municipality of Carmignano. The two previous projects had crashed against insurmountable economic and logistical difficulties. So why insist on that path? Perhaps, maliciously, you might think that they tried to take advantage of the “promise”, whose failure to complete, would fall back, in any case, on future administrators.
Divisions occurred between those who were in favour of decentralisation of services to the suburbs and those who preferred them in the larger cities, centralised but better equipped . But it is also true that there was a dramatic health situation at the time. For several years the cost of caring for the poor and needy citizens had been at municipalities’ expense. Famines (and poor diet) had increased hospitalisation, and in the last years of the nineteenth century the municipal debt accrued because of the many hospitals of the area. The hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence (253 hospitalisations for 7,366 days of care in 1900) had reached impressive levels: almost 10% of total expense, a burden which almost made every other investment impossible.
Therefore building a hospital, even though difficult, seemed, the only way to bring spending under control: maybe with some income from the nearby towns without hospitals, in cases where they admitted their fellow citizens. It seemed a wise and almost obligatory choice. Carmignano, that at the beginning of the twentieth century had 13,000 inhabitants, in fact, used to spend 18 thousand lire a year for the “spedalità” (hospitalisation) of the poor. Another 10 thousand lire was paid by the wealthy citizens and six thousand disbursed by visiting relatives. An income of more than 30 thousand lire a year, for a hospital that could cost around 100,000 lire.
The municipalities of Signa and Lastra Signa had agreed on joint and inter-municipality management. To complete the coverage of the building, that was in the opinion of banks worth at least ninety thousand lire, the friars had accumulated a debt of forty thousand lire. To cover its deficit and make the structure operational seventy thousand lire were needed. But even with the latest offerings of the friars, a financial guarantee for a further loan and then the sale of the property, the City said no. And May 15, 1907, seven months after the celebration of the completion of the building, the dream of a hospital in Carmignano was shattered definitively. (Wf)