Constantly there were audiences in various halls, starting from the Clementine Hall, through the throne room and others. They were separated by considerable distances; sometimes the Pope had to overcome several hundred meters. His secretaries pointed out that at such distances the Holy Father should not be transported on a chair with tiny wheels, because there is a risk that the wheels will jam somewhere, the chair will block and something bad will happen. So, they commissioned me to design a small movable platform on which it would be possible to place the Pope with an armchair and push the whole thing from one hall to another. However, the slope of such a platform could not be large, which meant that it would be necessary to push the Pope in the presence of the faithful along the ramp on the length of four or five meters to the top of the platform, and this in my opinion was not an option. I remember having two days to come up with something… I bent over backwards. None of us engineers were able to find a good solution. Late in the evening I came home, various ideas were swirling in my head, but none of them made sense. And suddenly, at night, I dreamed of a solution. To this day, I am convinced that it was really the finger of God, some kind of revelation. I came up with a model of a small U-shaped platform that perfectly surrounded the chair. The chair itself had a lifting system like the one at the altar, consisting of two reclining parts. The upper part entered the aforementioned platform, and the lower part rose and hid like wheels in an airplane at take-off. We made it! And from that moment on, the Pope moved around the Apostolic Palace in this way.
Magdalena Wolińska-Riedi “It happened in the Vatican”
Znak Publishing House. Kraków 2020
Pages: 204 – 205
