“Friends, as you will have seen my dad is gone. I cannot reply to your many messages that I see arriving, because I am in the middle of the sea and we have just made a rescue, as he taught me”. The daughter of Gino Strada, Cecilia, 42, greets his father with these words, a few minutes after the news of the disappearance of the founder of Emergency.
The message arrives with a post on Facebook, published in these hours. Cecilia, Gino’s only beloved daughter, after having been president of the organization founded by her father for eight years, left it in July four years ago.
At the time there was no lack of discussions on the future of Emergency, which Gino saw as a great international organization in the style of Medecins sans frontieres, while his daughter imagined a more militant and politically aligned NGO. Normal dynamics in an associative reality that has become very large, with huge donation capitals to manage, several hospitals in the hotspots of the world chessboard, tens of thousands of members, very present in the collective debate.
When the funeral was celebrated in 2009, Milan gathered around the family and paraded in a long procession in memory. Then his name was inscribed in the Famedio of the monumental cemetery, together with the names of those who made Milan great.
Gino Strada’s Milan: from Emergency events in the square to excellent meetings
The demonstrations in the square in Milan for the Liberation Day, the meetings with the symbolic characters of the city – from Giuliano Pisapia to Massimo Moratti, from Beppe Sala to Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini – but also the events and initiatives organized by Emergency, the humanitarian association founded in Milan in 1994 by Gino Strada, who passed away today at the age of 73. Strada was born in Sesto San Giovanni and graduated in medicine and surgery from the State University of Milan. In September 2017, Casa Emergency opened in Milan, the new headquarters of the organization in via Santa Croce 19, born in an abandoned school in the 1940s and recovered thanks to a redevelopment notice by the Municipality that gave the organization a concession for the building. .
“I embrace you all, strong, I am close to you, and we feel when we can “, concludes Cecilia, who has continued the maternal tradition, interpreting her role and also the positions assumed in a very personal and political way. Of course, an inheritance is not. easy what he will have to bring, now that his parents are no longer there, founders of what is perhaps one of the most famous and important realities of the Italian third sector .
Farewell to Gino Strada, the condolences on social media: “In his heart there was all the good in the world”
Gino Strada’s son-in-law is also at sea, Maso Notarianni, husband of Cecilia, with whom he had a son by now twenty.
Now, all of Gino’s closest collaborators, including his right-hand man Pietro Parrino, are rushing back to Milan and will gather at the headquarters in Piazza Santa Croce to decide on the initiatives to be taken in the coming days.
.