Biba goes across a corner of lawn following something. It's the noise of the dry leaves below the frayed wall, and the blur of white flowers against the green lawn. We chat as we follow her, me and Gisa, until Biba turns around to check on our presence, smiles and goes a bit further. Gisa wants to steer her away from things dirty and rotten, but Biba knows better. There are things she sees in the way little stones are trapped by the brown dirt, and the way flowers crumble between her fingers when she pulls them hard from the ground. There's a mystery in the way green musk layering the bark of the trees pulverizes under her thumb, and the dogs behind the fence are thrilling as they come closer to smell and lick her fingers and she backs away, excited. They are very big and strangely attractive and incontrollable.
There are gray hard stairs in a corner of the garden, that Biba wants to climb up and down over and over again, it might be for the satisfaction of doing it or for the way the landscape changes as she moves. She doesn't really know. They're very high steps for her, she's is so small, it's an adventure. Gisa wants to hold her hand but she doesn't. So she stumbles and hits her forehead against the base of the railing but just like her father, she almost never feels physical pain. The bump doesn't bother her. Cries a little for the shock, gets back on her feet and up and down the stairs again. We follow. Talking out our fears and hopes and the distance in the sunny milanese spring day.

As this story goes, the Italian polyclinic "Umberto I" in Rome, one of the largest hospitals in Europe, after having outsourced in these shortage years to a bunch of private contractors all its maintenance, today doesn't even know the exact number of its employees anymore. That's why the mythic journalist Fabrizio Gatti posing as a cleaning man managed to easily infiltrate the Hospital.
Every Italian will immediately grasp the reason why to infiltrate a public Hospital in this fashion, especially by a journalist who in the past has infiltrated and documented places like detention camps for illegal aliens and Mafia's slavery fields. The reason is the unbelievable condition of neglect in which Italian hospitals are generally left. Dirtiness, untidiness, broken stuff left around, abandoned toxic material, private files left open, generally run down infrastructures.
Every patient and medic knows that this is the normal background of Italian hospitals, especially in big cities.

Although not worn out at the levels of the Polyclinic Umberto I in Rome, the Polyclinic of Milan is not much better. Old and rotten in most parts, scarce of staff and certainly easy to break in, given that day and night anybody use it as a crossing way from one part of the city to the other, it could make a nice subject for another infiltration documentary.

Fabrizio Gatti has done a good work, as always: documented with loads of videos this time. Everything can be accessed here.
I am not going to translate the entire article, but here's a taste:

The storage facility for cultures of bacteria and viruses of the Department for Infectious and Tropical Diseases has no lock: without surveillance, with test tubes potentially infectious in the open, it is always accessible to anyone. For three days nobody cleans away the excrements that the Night of St. Stefan a stray dog left in the corridor used to move patients from a unit to another. Nurses and stretcher-bearers often smoke even when they move the infirm around with wheelchairs or stretchers. Every time the patients, even the most critically ill ones, are moved from Intensive Care or from the Emergency Room or from the operating rooms, naked under the sheets, intubated or with oxygen, they follow the same path of the garbage. They end between black bags and yellow cardboard boxes amassed in the basement, or lined behind the trash carts. And when the operators wash down the remains of garbage with jets of water, the wheels of the stretchers get soaked with sewage, and then pull the dirtiness along to the wards.

If I have to criticize something of this article, it is only its ending: "Tonight as always the waiting room of the Emergency Room is crowded. They are forced to wait for the work pace of the public health. And to have faith. They are not called Silvio Berlusconi and none of them can afford to be recovered in the United States."
Now, although as an Italian politician Berlusconi is directly responsible for this shame altogether with a bunch of other oligarchs, the polemic against him has not much sense in these terms. He is certainly not the only one who goes to the United States to have a heart-replacement operation. There's enough people in Italy rich enough to be recovered in the United States if they have to, only they probably will recur to it as a last resort, just like he did. We always tend to overlook how much rich people there is here, and how much rich is a western European country in general.
Also, to say "recovered in the United States" like if that means tout-court having a better health care seems optimistic to say the least. Although hospitals are undoubtedly better kept there, as far as I know infections caused by permanence at the hospitals are fairly common, and good infiltration documentaries are or can be certainly done there too.