Such challenges I had more. For example, I had to create a wheelchair in an instant that could fit in a microscopic elevator leading from the Courtyard of Sixtus V to the Papal apartment itself. But fortunately, I was able to do it.
There was also a story with the car. Fiat once gave the Pope a thesis lancia. It was necessary to figure out how to enable him to use this gift. One day I went to a factory in Turin to have the engineers adapt this unit to the needs of an exceptional passenger: they prepared a special seat that could be extended and then slid in with the Pope sitting on it. So they did. Unfortunately, this mechanism did not work well and the Pope moved by car maybe twice.
However, when it comes to the papamobile, which John Paul II used almost to the end, we also placed a special platform next to it, which drove up to the vehicle itself, and in the middle I installed a unique armchair for the Pope. Unique, not only because it had the correct small dimensions and slightly rotated, but above all, because it was associated with an unusual story.
A few years earlier, in our furniture warehouse in the Vatican, on a pile of other furniture, chambers and stools, I found an old snow-white fully rotating armchair. I thought that the color was perfect, just right for the Pope, and that it was too much of a coincidence to throw away this piece of furniture. I had a feeling that it might come in handy one day. And, so it happened. This chair, as it turned out later, once belonged to… hairdresser of John XXIII. We restored the seat in our furniture restoration lab and placed it in the middle of the jeep so that the Pope could freely turn in different directions, greet and bless the faithful without much effort.
Magdalena Wolińska-Riedi “It happened in the Vatican”
Znak Publishing House. Kraków 2020
Pages: 205 – 207
