GAETA.- The Cy Twombly Foundation, headed by Nicola Del Roscio, has undertaken an important action of support for Gaeta (LT), the small city in Lazio where the great American artist lived from the 1990s until his death in 2011. In response to the appeal launched by its mayor Cosmo Mitrano to raise funds for the setting up of a modern centre of specialist diagnostics at the former “Monsignor Di Liegro” hospital facility in Gaeta, whose Department of Infectious Diseases was reopened on 24 March last, the foundation has donated $500,000 (equivalent to € 478,000), with the aim of providing the region of the Gulf of Gaeta and southern Lazio with an institution that will also be able to respond quickly and effectively to the terrible health crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

As a mark of appreciation for this crucial pledge, the city council has decided to dedicate the new diagnostic centre to the memory of Cy Twombly.

Nicola Del Roscio has shown himself to be a friend of Gaeta on more than one occasion, helping to preserve the city’s cultural heritage with the securing and reclamation of the Porta Domnica in the heart of the historic city centre in 2018 and the restoration of the Palazzo della Gran Guardia in 2019, as well as its environmental heritage with the project of landscape improvement in the municipal territory. Since 2014, with the foundation that bears his name, Nicola Del Roscio has been working on the upgrading of a plot of land located next to the Botanical Garden of Monte Orlando and facing onto the Gulf, expropriated by the municipality of Gaeta after the demolition of unauthorized structures.

More convinced than ever of the pressing need to protect its residents and all the inhabitants of the municipalities of the Gulf of Gaeta and southern Lazio by setting up facilities for the prevention of disease and the safeguarding of the community’s health, the City Council of Gaeta has responded to the extremely generous donation it has received by committing itself, in agreement with the Local Health Authority of Latina, to immediately take all the steps necessary to achieve their common goal.
The municipality of Gaeta will be able to acquire state-of-the-art machinery and equipment for use free of charge in the new centre at the former hospital of “Monsignor Di Liegro” and other facilities in the municipal territory of Gaeta. The Local Health Authority, in turn, will work on the identification and adaptation of suitable premises in the former hospital, making its own medical staff available and taking responsibility for maintenance of the spaces and equipment, submitting an annual report on the activity it has carried out. In this way the “Monsignor Di Liegro”, after the reopening of the Infectious Disease Ward with twelve beds, equipped with pressurized chambers for the treatment of patients positive to coronavirus, will be able to improve its diagnostic activities thanks to a new and extensive range of equipment, considerably lightening the workload on the other facilities active in the area.

Cosmo Mitrano, mayor of the municipality of Gaeta, has explained: “The specialist diagnostics centre of the ‘Monsignor Di Liegro’ in Gaeta will be named after Cy Twombly, as a mark of gratitude and appreciation for the generous gesture and for the support that, in this circumstance too, Nicola Del Roscio has offered the city. The donation that the Cy Twombly Foundation has chosen to make to our cause has contributed in a decisive manner to the raising of funds for the purchase of state-of-the-art instruments and equipment.

“An urgent need made even more pressing following the pandemic that, in our region, is putting the health of around 150,000 inhabitants at risk. Consequently I have felt a moral obligation to act at once and in the best way possible to bring about continual improvement in the quality of the services delivered on behalf of our residents and those of the municipalities of the Gulf of Gaeta and southern Lazio. Whence the idea of raising funds for the setting up of a specialist diagnostic centre at the ‘Monsignor Di Liegro’, providing the public medical facility with the diagnostic equipment and machinery that the Local Health Authority has indicated as indispensable and that can also be used for the rapid diagnosis of patients potentially infected with COVID-19. If all this is a reality today, we must acknowledge the great merit of the Cy Twombly Foundation and in particular Nicola Del Roscio, a person of great sensitivity who, just as in the past, has given an enormous boost to an initiative that this time is aimed not at the preservation of our city’s cultural heritage, as in the case of the restoration of the Porta Domnica and the Gran Guardia, or at the landscape improvement he has promoted on Gaeta’s behalf, but at the safeguarding of public health and thus the saving of human lives. The writer Sergio Bambarén has declared: ‘looking inside yourself you can find joy, but it is only by helping your fellows that you will know true happiness’. To Nicola Del Roscio and the Cy Twombly Foundation, I would like to express my unbounded gratitude for having made a decisive contribution to the realization of a dream: doing good by sharing that happiness for which we all yearn.”

Nicola Del Roscio has said: “I decided to support Mayor Cosmo Mitrano’s initiative in order to give back to the city and its inhabitants all the affection that this matchless land has shown over the years, not just to me, but to all those who have been able to enjoy its scenery rich in history and the incomparable panorama that can be admired from the hills facing onto the Tyrrhenian Sea. Art and nature are the fundamental sustenance for the ideas that make humanity worthy of memory and I am convinced that those who have the means must do everything in their power to allow this society to continue in its study and its development. The crisis caused by the spread of COVID-19 has drawn attention to the enormous importance of the role played by early diagnosis in tackling any kind of illness, which is why it is necessary to strengthen the medical facilities of our country. I am sure that the municipality – whose administration is able to count on courageous and spirited people like Mayor Cosmo Mitrano – will be able to carry out excellent work to protect the health and well-being of this extraordinary community.”