Antonio Maglio (Cairo, Egypt, 1912 - Rome, Italy, 1988)

Antonio Maglio concealed the gaze of a visionary man and the courage of a pioneer behind a pair of heavy black-framed glasses. In 1950s Italy, where therapies and rehabilitation treatments for spinal cord injuries were still largely unknown, the great Apulian neurologist challenged the inertia and scepticism of colleagues, politicians and entrepreneurs for a long time. With his insights, he anticipated the course of history and managed to restore a normal life to paraplegics, turning many of them into sports champions. His utopia became reality in September 1960, when planes loaded with men and women who leaned on crutches and moved around in wheelchairs started landing at Rome Ciampino airport. They were the sports delegations that would participate in the first Paralympic Games in history. For a fortnight, just after the end of the 17th Olympic Games, around four hundred wheelchair athletes from some twenty countries representing five continents competed in Acqua Acetosa facilities in Rome in various disciplines, from fencing to basketball, from swimming to athletics, from shot put to archery and many more. The most numerous delegation was the Italian one: eventually, the richest medal table was also Italian, including 29 gold, 28 silver and 23 bronze medals for a total of 80 medals. However, this record did transcend pure sport and took on a salvific, almost cathartic, function for human beings.

That competition - highly unusual for the time - was the crowning achievement of a journey that three years earlier had led Antonio Maglio to open Inail paraplegic centre in Villa Marina, on Ostia seafront. It was the first facility of its kind in Italy and one of the few in Europe, specialising in the care of individuals affected by myelopathy and with disabilities. At the time, the concept of rehabilitation did not yet exist and those who had suffered a spinal cord injury were forced to live in a terrible disabling condition, unable to carry out any kind of activity.

However, in just a few years, Maglio’s innovative work and experiments would revolutionise the entire sector by promoting hitherto unknown concepts including patient care, occupational therapy, social-occupational reintegration and equality while respecting different conditions. Due to him, Villa Marina quickly turned into one of the centres of excellence in Europe for physical and psychological recovery of patients. His approach was largely based on sport-therapy: Maglio taught these people to swim and to tackle sports disciplines in wheelchairs that were previously completely unthinkable for them. To think of them as new challenges. He achieved extraordinary results that made a seemingly unrealisable dream possible: turn Rome into the first Paralympics capital of the world.

Born in Cairo in 1912, the son of a diplomat, after graduating in medicine, Antonio Maglio had been employed at Trieste branch of Inail and in 1941, during the Second World War, had been sent to direct the health service on the Italian-Yugoslavian border. There he had seen many soldiers come back from the front in desperate conditions, missing limbs or becoming paraplegic due to spinal cord injuries. After the war, he specialised in neurology and psychiatry and started to be inspired by experimental therapies used in Stoke Mandeville hospital, on the outskirts of London, where German-born British physician Sir Ludwig Guttmann had initiated a group of war veterans with spinal cord injuries into sport. Maglio became persuaded that sport was the right key to give many people a future, a therapy to keep the body fit but also (and perhaps above all) medicine for the spirit.

When he was appointed medical director of the new Inail Centre for Paraplegics in Ostia in 1957, he was inspired by Guttmann’s sports-therapy programmes. But unlike at Stoke Mandeville hospital, he opened up the centre to all injured workers - not just war veterans - and did not simply import the British model, he significantly expanded health programmes and the range of sports disciplines involved. The value of his therapeutic approach immediately proved to be extraordinary, starting with the decrease in patients’ mortality rates and even the alleviation of their depressive states. Then, in 1958, Maglio suggested Guttmann to transfer to Rome the Games for the Disabled that had been held in Stoke Mandeville for some years. The idea was to take advantage of the Olympic Games being held in Italy two years later to organise, in the same facilities, a competition for paraplegics and disabled people from all over the world. The ambitious project of combining the Paralympic Games with the Olympics was pursued with tenacity by the Italian physician and eventually became reality in Rome in September 1960.

The first Paralympic champions would be born within the walls of Villa Marina, the innovative centre directed by Maglio in Ostia. But above all, the utopia of the Apulian neurologist would mark the journey towards the birth of the Paralympic Games as they are today, an event that mobilises millions of spectators and has gained respect and popularity all around the world. Antonio Maglio passed away in 1988 of a sudden illness and left an indelible mark on the history of the Paralympic movement, by fostering a fairer society that would be more respectful towards disability.