In Pergine Valsugana the new national centre for Paralympic sport

Legacy - legacy - is the password to give meaning to the Games and is planting deep roots in Pergine Valsugana, ten kilometres from Trento. Here, there is the Villa Rosa rehabilitation hospital, a public reference centre for all brain and spinal cord injury patients in the province. Here, a paralympic centre of national reference will be built, created by the synergy between Asuit, the Azienda sanitaria universitaria integrata del Trentino, the Autonomous Province of Trento, the Municipality of Pergine and Cip, the Italian Paralympic Committee.

It all starts in 2020, when Jacopo Bonavita, director of the hospital rehabilitation unit-Villa Rosa, arrives in Pergine. He is in a recently completed facility in which, as in many other national centres, the rehabilitation departments have agreements with the CIP, which sends instructors trained in Paralympic sports and materials, thanks to which the rehabilitation centres can initiate in-patients into sport, because practising sport is a powerful rehabilitative tool, capable of improving a patient's autonomy, strength, endurance, limb control. It is the sport-therapy. But - Bonavita thought, with the provincial president of the Cip, Massimo Bernardoni - more could be done: 'Villa Rosa is a large facility, already equipped with a swimming pool, gymnasium, movement analysis laboratory, an advanced aids centre, a domotic flat, but with 1,400 square metres of unfinished areas. Why not make it a Paralympic sports centre adjacent to the hospital to enhance the synergy between sport and health, offering Paralympic athletes and people with disabilities who choose the facility to train professional figures such as sports physicians, rehabilitation doctors, physiotherapists, athletic trainers, and classifiers?".

After the first meetings between the provincial government, the CIP and Villa Rosa, the idea of building another gym, small individual gyms, clinics and research laboratories in the empty spaces is gaining ground: 'The Faculty of Motor Sciences of the University of Verona and the Department of Materials Engineering of the University of Trento operate in the area,' continues Bonavita, 'with which research projects linking sport with materials engineering, mechatronics and robotics could be launched. Thus opening up the innovation side. And the municipality of Pergine Valsugana is also taking part in the project, offering a disused school next to Villa Rosa to be transformed into a guesthouse, so that, once the work is completed, the centre could become a training and training centre for national teams. It will be, overall, an important intervention supported by the Autonomous Province of President Maurizio Fugatti with a sum of around 8 million euro.

The centre, given to the CIP or its satellite body to be managed as a national reference centre for Paralympic sports, will be able to make use of Villa Rosa's medical services and has the potential to offer Pergine a new tourist vocation, which is not just for winter. In a few square kilometres there are the ski slopes of Bondone, those of Paganella, the ice ring in Baselga di Pinè, the curling field in Val di Cembra, and Lake Caldonazzo, where there are sailing boats for people with disabilities, cycle paths that can be covered by handbike, and areas for paraclimbing, climbing and archery: "Villa Rosa will become a flywheel for the area," the director concludes, "and will be able to transform Alta Valsugana into a disability friendly place. Because, when institutions team up, legacy stops being the password of so many press conferences and becomes concrete.