In 1869, the Bambino Gesú Children’s Hospital of Rome was founded from the initiative of the Salviati family with the help of friends and benefactors. Duchess Arabella Salviati was deeply moved when seeing young patients hospitalized alongside adults without any special regards. She advocated the founding of a hospital just for children modeled after the one in Paris. The Bambino Gesú Children’s Hospital started with only four beds and with supervision from the Daughters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul. The City recognized the good deed that was started and the hospital grew. It came to be known primarily as serving Roman children afflicted with bone tuberculosis. In 1924, the Salviati family concerned about the future for the Hospital donated it to Pope Pius XI. It became known as the Hospital of the Pope and with the new ownership it continued to develop and grow thanks to donations by private patrons. However, World War II left the hospital broken structurally and financially and recovery was slow. In the 1960s financial assistance came from American bishops. In 1978 Pope Paul VI gave the hospital a large area of sea coast located a few miles from Rome which already had three pavilions treating children with polio and spastic paralysis. The facility was redeveloped to become the Center for Vertebral Deformity and Diabetes Treatment. It later became the Hospital’s facility at Palidoro, a leading medical facility for cutting edge surgical techniques. The hospital now carries out its healthcare at 4 locations, has 3,500 employees, currently has 600 beds and is ranked at an international level for the healthcare and treatment of children and adolescents. Per year the Hospital has almost 29,000 inpatient admissions, 30,000 surgical and interventional procedures, 85,000 emergency admissions and almost 2 million outpatient services. In 1985 the Hospital was certified by the Italian Ministry of Health as a research hospital and its intense research programs began working alongside it clinical and healthcare activities. In 2014 the Hospital’s new laboratories opened covering 5,400 sq. ft. and containing the most modern equipment for cellular and genetic investigations, which includes a cell factory dedicated to large-scale manufacturing of advanced therapies. Researchers at the Bambino Gesú Children’s Hospital in collaboration with the University of Rome and other European and U.S. research centers have recently made an important breakthrough in cancer research and the study was published in the science magazine Nature in April 2021. The new discovery opens the way to creating therapies that block the defense system of diseased cells and causing them to self-destruct
