Fabio Ciciliano: the new face of civil protection between medical expertise and emergency management
Fabio Ciciliano, medical director of the State Police, has been chosen as the new head of Civil Protection. With extensive experience in emergency management and a medical background, Ciciliano is preparing to lead the organisation at a time of climate and environmental changes that require an effective response. First press meeting on Thursday
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Key points
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To paraphrase Elly Schlein, we saw it coming. Fabio Ciciliano, a medical director of the State Police, an expert in disaster medicine, is the man chosen by the Meloni government to replace Fabrizio Curcio at the head of the Council Presidency's Civil Protection department. A change at the top communicated to the Council of Ministers on Monday by the competent minister, Nello Musumeci, not without generating tensions. Inside and outside Palazzo Chigi.
Ciciliano's name is not a new one. Born in 1972, he is Neapolitan and very attached to his city, where he studied, graduated in medicine and specialised in surgery, before going on to study public administration at the University of Catania and gaining two master's degrees: in business and company management (at the Pegaso athenaeum in the Campania capital) and in defence against nuclear, radiological, chemical and biological weapons (at the Sapienza in Rome).
The first missions and immigration management
.His adventure in emergency management began very early: at the end of the 1990s, he took part in post-earthquake rescue missions in Colfiorito, Umbria, and post-flood in Campania, between Sarno and Quindici. In the early 2000s, he managed Red Cross interventions in San Valentino Torio (Salerno) for the collapse of a building, in Soverato after the flooding of the Beltrame river, and in Marigliano for the reception centre set up for refugees from Kosovo. In 2008 and 2009 he took on the general management of the Ponte Galeria Cie in Rome, in 2010 he worked with Guido Bertolaso , appointed by the then Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi as undersecretary for the waste emergency in Campania, and in 2011 he was appointed by the government as commissioner delegate for the immigration emergency from North Africa.
Bertolaso's congratulations: "About time!"
Bertolaso himself was one of the first to congratulate Ciciliano on his climb to the top of the Civil Protection department. "It's about time,' the current regional councillor for Welfare in Lombardy wrote on Facebook, without hiding his enthusiasm for the handover and indeed expressing his expectations: 'Let's see if now a structure that is essential to the nation will return to dealing with the country's thousands of problems by putting its face, heart and brain into it, taking on all the responsibilities and fully involving those extraordinary human resources, the true soul of the Civil Protection dreamed up and desired by Giuseppe Zamberletti.
From Iran to Haiti, experiences abroad
International missions began in the same years, interspersed with interventions for the major earthquakes in L'Aquila in 2009 and in the Centre-North in 2012: Ciciliano worked in India, Iran, Benin, and then in Haiti as coordinator of the Civil Defence's health function after the devastating earthquake of 2010 and the subsequent cholera epidemic. In 2011, he was in Japan after the tsunami and the nuclear emergency.
