Alex Zanardi, the villa is on fire: transferred to a medical center in Vicenza

The fire perhaps due to the photovoltaic system. The sample was taken to the same rehabilitation ward of the San Bortolo hospital where he had already been hospitalized

Moments of fear at Alex Zanardi’s house yesterday afternoon, due to a fire on the roof of his villa in Noventa Padovana. To go up in flames, in the two-storey house of the former motoring champion who since June two years ago is forced to live attached to machinery following a dramatic road accident that took place during a handbike event in Tuscany, is state of the photovoltaic system: the immediate intervention of the firefighters limited the fire in a short time, preventing the flames from spreading to the rest of the house.

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Transferred to Vicenza

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Fortunately, the fire did not cause serious damage to the villa, but it still sent the photovoltaic system into a tailspin, a factor that could have jeopardized the correct functioning of the machinery that help Zanardi to live. For this reason, the family members of the former Formula 1 driver opted, as a precaution, to transfer to a well-equipped medical center in Vicenza. It is probably the same structure, the San Bortolo hospital, where, since the end of April 2021, Zanardi spent several months on the first floor of the rehabilitation department.

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Fighter

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After the accident, which occurred when colliding with a truck that proceeded in the opposite direction on 19 June 2020 on Statale 146 near Pienza, Zanardi, who for years has been a symbol in sport for the handicapped, managing to win, in the para-cycling specialty, four gold medals at the London Games in 2012 and Rio in 2016, had embarked on a long path to rehabilitation. In an interview about a year ago, his wife Daniela had stated that Zanardi was fighting like a lion. At Christmas, the former Formula 1 driver had finally returned home. “He is a fighter, but in this year and a half, with Covid, in the hospital and in the clinic we have been able to stay little, and few, close to him. Now returning to his family will do him good and will help him fight even more”. A granitic willpower, that of Zanardi, who between January and February underwent a cycle of treatment at the Ravenna hyperbaric center. Yet another challenge, after the terrible accident of 15 September 2001 in which, during the Formula Cart race on the Lausitzring circuit in Germany, after losing control of his car, he was hit by another car. In the collision, Zanardi lost his lower limbs and suffered 7 cardiac arrests.

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Driver cleared

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Fate, however, presented him with another mountain to climb, when in June two years ago, during a leg of the Obiettivo Tricolore handbike relay, Zanardi collided with a truck. In the impact he suffered very serious head injuries, remaining in a pharmacological coma until January last year. Last July, the investigating judge of Siena ordered the filing of the investigation launched after the accident, accepting the request of the Public Prosecutor’s Office. The only suspect in the investigation was the driver of the truck, accused of negligent injury. But for the judge there was no causal link between the presence of the truck and the dramatic collision. According to a consultancy arranged by the prosecutors, the overrun of the center line by the truck was “less than 40 cm” and “minimum given the type of vehicle and the road traveled”.

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