About the 1977 world congress of pediatric otorhinolaryngology in Sirmione

Back in the 1970s in Europe, but also in the United States, Latin America and Australia, pediatric otorhinolaryngologysts were scattered in specialized hospitals, university clinics and institutes and hadmostly occasional contacts with colleagues in their own or not too distant countries. Pediatric ORL was not considered officially a speciality of its own (such as surgery, orthopedics and – obviously – internal medicine). I have been able to find evidence of organized meetings with participation of an international faculty in USA, the United Kingdom and – with more frequency and a larger attendance – in countries of Eastern Europe which, in these years, were still separated from Western Europe by the Iron Curtain. These colleagues worked in larger networks with more departments covering their countries, many had academic status with regular postgraduate teaching, leading to an official diploma in pediatric ORL. For them, contact with thewest was difficult but not impossible and – in some cases – quite regular and here we come to the point. In Italy, Carlo Gatti Manacini was in charge of a large pediatric ORL department in Brescia, Northern Italy. He was an outstanding personality, full of enthusiasm and had already organized small east–west meetings but had come upon the idea of realizing an event on a large scale, a world congress. He was quite aware of the necessity – considering the planned scale and complexity of such an enterprise – of collaboration for planning a scientific program, finding possible speakers and spreading the newsworldwide. So he contacted me in Trieste and Giulio Pestalozza in Milan. Although being long-time friends and becoming gradually infected by his idea, it was not easy to convince him that