On a summer evening six years ago, the Italian tennis player Stefano Travaglia walked from his family’s sixth-floor apartment in the town of Ascoli Piceno near the Adriatic coast to the floor below. He needed to pick up some tennis shirts onto which an elderly neighbor had sewn sponsor patches for him. He bypassed the building’s elevator for the short trip, taking the stairs.
The simple errand turned disastrous: Travaglia’s flip-flops slipped on the recently cleaned floor, and he crashed down the stairs. He reached out his arms to protect his face as he crashed toward a plate-glass window at the base of the flight of stairs, and his right arm went through the glass.