Careggi Hospital

Careggi Hospital is the Florence hospital where Marco Carrera works as an ophthalmologist, a professional setting that also frames his closeness to Adele and his later decisions about care, illness, and bodily autonomy. It is not the place where Adele chooses to give birth: although water birth is available there and Marco could have secured her privileges, she insists on another hospital.

Workplace and Family Proximity

Marco’s ophthalmology clinic at Careggi Hospital stands opposite the pavilion housing Adele’s Faculty of Motor Sciences. Their neighboring institutions make it easy for father and daughter to meet, and they often have lunch together. Adele’s studies and work at a gym unfold alongside Marco’s established medical career, so the hospital is more than a backdrop: it is one of the ordinary places where their relationship remains active as she grows into adulthood.

Adele’s Birth Decision

When Adele becomes pregnant, she sets the terms of her care and birth. She chooses a water birth, a midwife named Norma, and Santa Maria Annunziata Hospital as the reference institution. Marco accepts her decisions, including her refusal of amniocentesis and of learning the baby’s sex through ultrasound. Careggi Hospital could also accommodate a water birth, and Marco might have obtained privileges for Adele there, but that professional access does not override her choice. Her daughter Miraijin is to be born at the institution Adele selected, in the municipal area of Bagno a Ripoli.

Medicine as Care and Responsibility

Marco’s work as a physician connects the hospital setting to the wider pattern of practical care in his life. When his father Probus is treated for cancer, Marco coordinates chemotherapy visits, monitors side effects and medication, arranges scans, and helps organize blood sampling at home. The narrative presents this labor as part of his life as a doctor, but also as family responsibility undertaken alongside work and raising Adele.

Professional Knowledge and Autonomy

Decades after beginning his medical career, Marco invokes his forty years as a doctor when explaining that his final act is his own decision, made in full mental clarity. He describes the drugs and infusion equipment prepared for his death and emphasizes that his medical experience enabled him to obtain them without involving anyone else. Careggi Hospital is not identified as the site of that act; its relevance is instead carried through Marco’s professional formation. The hospital’s associations with treatment and clinical knowledge sit beside his insistence that medical expertise can serve not only the prolongation of life, but also an autonomous choice at its end.