NEST CUCKOOS, FOR HUMAN PUPPIES: The “wheels” for infants, those who accept the gifts of innocence

Imagine a cylindrical object, made with wood. Imagine that niche, divided into two distinct parts. Imagine a human infant, unwanted by his parents, put in one of those two parts. Imagine a hand of mother, who runs the mechanism of wood, giving the piety that had grown in her womb of woman. Here, what you have imagined, existed for centuries – even today – for abandoned babies. In and out. From the womb of a mother, the womb of wood, which rotates on itself, receives a small life in a monastery or in a hospital. Perhaps, the many hands of mothers have also played a small bell, placed on either side of the wheel, to announce the arrival of a pity gift.

The “exposed” – as they were called those shoots of life – go to other hands, that would have given them first aid. In my city, as in many others, next to the “wheel of exposed”, there is still a small slit, that given to other hands and a different piety: put the money to help those who took care of human infants. This morning, reading a newspaper, I learned that Daniela – a new human baby – was placed in the “cradle of the thermal side,” hospital Florentine Carreggi. She has fair skin, and weighs only 700 grams and 1 kilo. She has made the biggest journey of his life, from innocence to piety.

Many, as always, in the history of the small human infants, are the reasons why a mother to extreme act of giving to others a part of herself. In the Italian Renaissance – but as early as the Middle Ages – the same city, Florence, had a special hospital, called “Hospital of the Innocents”, to testify for me (and for you, who read me), the color and the value of innocence . Then, there was the possibility of abandoning temporary, and a letter or an object (next to the human infant), donated the chance to return, to return the human infant to the biological parents. Today, it is no longer possible. Daniela is alive, the hospital doctors are optimistic on its diagnosis of acceptance. She will grow, exposed to life – without the possibility of a subsequent recognition – in the loving arms of her adoptive parents. Welcome, Daniela.