OUR HISTORY WITH SAN PATRIGNANO

Testimony of Barbara Piazza

"San Patrignano is an Italian family as we in Ruthinium imagine the family to be.

A place of rebirth. A place of dignity, work, training and second chances, such as only a family can provide.

It was inevitable that we would be linked as a company to this reality. During these years of collaboration, I got to know the young people who had lost everything because of drugs, whom I watched take their lives back in their hands thanks to the recovery programme at San Patrignano, surprising themselves with the people they had managed to become.

From the outside all this looks like a miracle, and it is, especially if you look at it through the eyes of parents who thought they had lost their children forever. I have so many memories at San Patrignano, all of them beautiful and exciting. The first lunch in the Community hall with all the boys, the hope and joy of the traditional Christmas party, the farewell greeting of the first boy I met and who completed the journey (Matteo, now father of a beautiful child), the meeting and handshake with President Mattarella. That's where the strong link with SanPatrignano lies for us.

To feel part of another big family that today welcomes around 1,400 boys and girls to listen to them and give them back to our society as active members. No matter what we are giving to SanPatrignano, it is of infinite value to us what we are learning. As a company and as people.”

Ruthinium has been a Dental Partner of the San Patrignano Community Medical Centre for a number of years: it works directly and free of charge with the Community's dental laboratory. In recent years a relationship of friendship, mutual esteem and interpenetration in research and training projects has flourished.