Born in Milan, the son of a paediatric surgeon, he took his degree in Medicine and Surgery in 1965 at Milan University, later specializing in General Surgery, Paediatric Surgery and Cardiovascular Surgery; but right from the start he was deeply interested in paediatric heart surgery.
Which is why in 1967 he decided to follow Lucio Parenzan’s pioneering work in Italy, at the Riuniti Hospitals of Bergamo, where Italian heart surgery for children was opening up a new large-scale development. And here, first as a paediatric surgeon, then after 1971 as a Consultant Heart Surgeon, he had the opportunity of acquiring lasting experience among the great heart specialists of the world, who were always glad to lend their skills and techniques to this dynamic Italian medical centre.
It was then that he also went abroad to perfect his training, at the University of Seattle (1973), and in Birmingham, under the direction of John Kirklin, at the Heart Surgery Centre of the University of Alabama (1979-80).
From 1992 he took over direction of the Paediatric Heart Surgery Department at the “G. Pasquinucci” Hospital in Massa, where he was to remain as Head of Department until 2003.
Since September 2003 he has been at work in the Humanitas Gavazzeni Institute in Bergamo and the Gaslini Hospital in Genoa.
In the course of his career he had performed more then 6 thousand operations, many of them on infants with particularly complicated heart conditions; he is a member of the leading Italian and European Heart Surgeons Societies.
As a collateral activity Dr. Vittorio Vanini has always given special attention to poor or developing countries, beginning in the 1980s with Poland when it was a ‘closed’ country at the time of Solidarnosc, where he succeeded in making repeated “expeditions” to operate on children with heart afflictions at the Warsaw Children’s Hospital. Next, he’s been involved for years in the treatment of african children with heart problems visiting them periodically at a Medical Centre in Nairobi.
In the 1990s, as Head Consultant at Massa during the war in ex-Yugoslavia he received and operated on something like a hundred little heart patients in his department, all sent to him from the war zones by the U. S. Rotary Club humanitarian association “Gift of Life”. Similarly, many others reached him from Algeria, Albania, Tunisia, and even from as far afield as Mexico and Russia.
Today the main “target” that focuses his efforts is to work with cardiopathic children of every nationality; all his enthusiasm and professional capacity is now addressed to a new generation of doctors who share the same enthusiasm.