SOME UNUSUAL SIGHTSEEING

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I have been the recipient of some strange  invitations since I moved to Sicily but I think the  strangest must be the unexpected one I received this morning:  bumping into a friend of mine who is a gastroenterologist, I was prevailed upon to  go with him to his departmental waiting room in the hospital  to view a display of the objects he has removed from patients' stomachs over the years.  

A splendid array of plastic jars contained nails, screws, items of jewellery, curtain clips, coins, ring-pulls and batteries:  the Modicani, it seems, love to swallow batteries and they don't consume them one at a time! The average, I discovered, is six in one go and not all of these were small batteries of the kind that might power a toothbrush - which brings me to the weirdest specimen:  I should have thought it would be rather challenging to swallow a conventional, adult-sized toothbrush but one patient obviously hadn't met with any difficulty at all and there the object was, still intact and proudly displayed on a shelf all to itself.   Few of the patients, said my friend, had been children.

I shouldn't think that the display would cheer you up much if you were waiting for a colonoscopy but it is certainly one of the sights of Modica!