The Istituto Giannina Gaslini is the biggest pediatric hospital of North Italy, located in Genoa Quarto dei Mille and founded by the Italian industrialist, politician and philanthropist Gerolamo Gaslini (Count of Saint Jerome) in 1938. It is considered one of the best children's hospitals of Europe, it is known worldwide and in 1956 it was recognized as Istituto di Ricovero e Cura a Carattere Scientifico (IRCCS). History In 1931 Gerolamo Gaslini, together with his wife Lorenza, had the idea of building an institute for care and infancy named after his daughter Giannina, who died in 1917 at eleven years old, perhaps due to peritonitis which was not diagnosed in time. Gaslini did not accept the fact that children could die for lack of timely and adequate treatment, so he decided to create a pediatric hospital. "The thought of the conception and realization of the work that is identified in the Giannina Gaslini Institute, which is, at the same time, an instrument of good and an act of love towards my beloved, lost Creature, in the painful memory of her precocious maternal feeling, it arose and matured in my soul in the distant 1917, in the middle of the war, in certainly not propitious conditions to such an initiative." Gaslini sent a technical health commission across Europe to design and build a modern and cutting-edge institute. The construction of the Institute began in 1932 and lasted six years, until the start of the activities in March 1938. An estimate of the costs supported by Gaslini is around 55 million of Italian lire which correspond to several million euros. The institute has brought further innovations also from a social point of view: Gerolamo Gaslini established that there had to be perfect equality of treatment between legitimate and illegitimate children because the right to assistance comes from the state of need and not from a social position. Furthermore, the institute has always set up a solidarity fund in favor of children and less wealthy families. The first management experience was of a consortium. Gaslini wanted to involve local, administrative, and scientific institutions in the start of activities, thus he formed a consortium which he will have dissolved in 1946, assuming the administration of the Institute until 1960, when the first board of directors was settled. In 1949, Gerolamo Gaslini gave away all his possessions, making them flow into the homonymous foundation. The task