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A young woman with brain cancer named Brittany Maynard made news recently when she spoke
about her decision to end her life rather than succumb to the last ravages of her disease.
Maynard moved to Oregon because it has a law that enables terminally ill people to obtain
a lethal dose of barbiturates.
Whether doctors and caregivers should be allowed to help someone like Maynard hasten her own
death is the subject of a long-running, state-by-state battle. Our story tonight is about a woman
who was prosecuted for allegedly helping her 93-year-old father kill himself. Barbara Mancini
lives in Pennsylvania, a state that does not have a law like Oregon's. Her father was terminally
ill and in pain and had repeatedly said he wanted to die. One morning while she was caring
for him, Mancini says he asked her to hand him his bottle of morphine.
Barbara Mancini: He asked me to hand him the bottle and I did. I had the dosing syringe
in my hand. He took the cap off and he drank what was remaining in the bottle.
Anderson Cooper: Could you have stopped him?
Barbara Mancini: I could have, I think. I mean he did it pretty quickly. But no, I didn't
try to stop him.
This is Barbara Mancini and her father Joe Yourshaw in happier times, at Barbara's wedding
in 1994. Yourshaw had served in Europe during World War II and earned a bronze star in the
Battle of the Bulge. Barbara had always known him to be industrious and strong-minded. He
was active well into his eighties. But by last year, he was 93 and suffering from kidney
disease, cardio-vascular problems, and a host of other ailments. His medical records say
doctors expected him to live "six months or less" and he was telling anyone who'd listen
he wanted to die.
Barbara Mancini: He had very focused convictions about how he wanted to live. And being independent
was a big part of that.
Anderson Cooper: He didn't want to wind up infirm in a hospital bed on a...
Barbara Mancini: No.
Anderson Cooper: ...a feeding tube
Barbara Mancini: Absolutely not. He was adamant that he never wanted to be in a hospital.
He put his wishes in writing and made Barbara his health care proxy. He stopped taking medications
that might prolong his life and enrolled in a home hospice program that prescribed small
doses of morphine he could drink to ease his pain. It was in February 2013, at his home
in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, that Barbara says he asked her to hand him that bottle
of morphine.
Anderson Cooper: What'd you think when you saw him drink it?
Barbara Mancini: I said, "Well, I think you just drank a lot of morphine there." And he
said, "I want to go to sleep." And I just sat down next to him. And I held his hand.
And he laid back and we started to talk.
Anderson Cooper: Did part of you think, "This is him saying goodbye"?
Barbara Mancini: Yes.
Anderson Cooper: Did you think at all about calling a hospital or...
Barbara Mancini: No.
Anderson Cooper: ...calling a doctor?
Barbara Mancini: I would not have done that because it was expressly against his wish.
And I promised him I would honor his wishes.
She did tell a hospice nurse who visited the house that morning what had happened, and
the hospice called the police. An officer soon came to the door.
Barbara Mancini: He told me I no longer had any say in what happened to my father.
Anderson Cooper: And he was taken to the hospital.
Barbara Mancini: He was.
Anderson Cooper: What happened to you?
Barbara Mancini: I was arrested on the spot.
Anderson Cooper: Did they tell you why you were under arrest?
Barbara Mancini: The police captain said I was being arrested for aiding a suicide.
Anderson Cooper: What's the penalty for that?
Barbara Mancini: Up to 10 years in prison.
Barbara Mancini believes that what happened that morning should not be against the law,
and in some states it isn't.
[Woman: We love you. We love you, Rog.]
If he'd lived in Oregon, Joe Yourshaw might have been able to end his life as this man
did, as captured in a 2011 documentary.
[Woman: You have the right to change your mind.]
[Man: My mind's not changing.]
This lethal potion of barbiturates was legally prescribed after two doctors certified he
was terminally ill and mentally competent. Because all the requirements of Oregon's law
were followed, no one involved was in danger of prosecution, even though some of them helped
him kill himself.
[There's your merchandise.]
More than 750 people in Oregon have used lethal prescriptions to end their lives since that
state enacted its "death with dignity" act seventeen years ago. Washington and Vermont
now have similar laws. In Montana and New Mexico, courts have ruled it's legal under
existing law. Everywhere else, surveys suggest, the practice goes on very quietly to keep
physicians and caregivers out of trouble.
Barbara Coombs Lee: What happened to Barbara Mancini was rare, but the risk of what happened
to her pervades every bedside of every dying individual.
Barbara Coombs Lee is president of Compassion & Choices, one of the nation's largest advocacy
groups on end-of-life issues. She helped write Oregon's "death with dignity" act, and believes
every state needs a similar law. Without it, she argues, doctors still write lethal prescriptions
but they do it in secret, without any standards.
Barbara Coombs Lee: Doctors often write prescriptions for life ending medication for each other.
Just as they write prescriptions for life ending medications for their patients with
winks and nods.
Anderson Cooper: And it shouldn't be done with winks and nods?
Barbara Coombs Lee: It should be a transparent, open process. That's how you make a practice
safe.
There are, of course, all sorts of objections - some religious, some moral, and some from
doctors themselves.
[Dr. Ira Byock: Anything we can do to just make this day a little bit better for you?]
Dr. Ira Byock is a Dartmouth professor and head of the Providence Health System's Institute
for Human Caring. He's been nationally recognized for his efforts to provide terminally ill
patients with better care. But he is strongly opposed to laws like Oregon's.
Dr. Ira Byock: There's certain things that people aren't supposed to do to one another
as absolutes. They are not okay. Doctors killing patients is not okay.
Anderson Cooper: But shouldn't people have the ability to determine when their life is
no longer worth living?
Dr. Ira Byock: You know, when a physician is involved in a suicide, it's a social action.
And if you want to look at the societies like Belgium and Netherlands, well, nowadays people
who have just lost interest in living, or are clinically depressed, are being euthanized
legally.
[Reporter: Is there anything you can say, Barbara?]
Barbara Mancini was released on bail, but she was forced to take an unpaid leave from
her job as an ER nurse.
The case against her was complicated by the fact that her father did not die right away
when he got to the hospital. His medical records indicate he "responded well" to a drug that
reversed the effects of the morphine and he "awoke" in the ER.
Barbara Mancini: My mother and my sister-in-law were with him and they said they had never
seen him so angry in his entire life. He pulled out his IV.
Anderson Cooper: He pulled out his own IV.
Barbara Mancini: Yeah, he apparently pulled off the wires for the heart monitor and tried
to get up and leave.
Four days after being taken to the hospital, Joe Yourshaw died. Though his death certificate
lists "morphine toxicity" as the primary cause, hospital records suggest a number of other
possible causes including "aspiration pneumonia," and "failure to thrive." The records also
show that because of his daughter's arrest, Yourshaw's family allowed the hospital to
provide medical treatment he specifically said, in his living will, he didn't want.
Barbara Coombs Lee says studies in medical journals indicate that's common, even when
there is no arrest.
Barbara Coombs Lee: I think most people don't realize that an advanced directive, the paper
that we fill out and have other people sign as witnesses, it can't mandate. It can't require
a doctor or a health care provider to do anything or not to do anything.
Anderson Cooper: I think most people think the complete opposite?
Barbara Coombs Lee: Actually in order for those wishes to have any force, they have
to be reduced to a medical order.
But only two states have well-established systems to ensure that a medical order regarding
life-sustaining treatment will be respected throughout the health care system. In other
states, there's no guarantee.
Barbara Mancini's court case dragged on for months. Though Compassion & Choices helped
pay some of her attorneys' fees, the legal bills mounted. And so she says did the stress
on her family.
Anderson Cooper: Did you feel that you had aided a suicide?
Barbara Mancini: No, I didn't. I felt like what I did was hand my father his medicine.
Now he didn't tell me, "I'm going to kill myself today." He asked me for the medicine.
Anderson Cooper: You think if Pennsylvania had a law like they have in Oregon, things
would've been different?
Barbara Mancini: I do. And I also feel that he should have had the option if he wanted
it.
But Dr. Byock, who reviewed Joe Yourshaw's records at our request, questions whether
Yourshaw would have needed a "death with dignity" law to end his life if he had simply received
better end-of-life care from his hospice.
Dr. Ira Byock: If I was his family, I would have been livid.
Anderson Cooper: Why?
Dr. Ira Byock: They were just doing the regulatory minimum for Mr. Yourshaw. And they weren't
really addressing his suffering to the extent it needed to be.
In a statement, the Hospice of Central Pennsylvania said, "by law we are unable to comment on
this specific case," but, "the care we provide... greatly exceeds the regulatory minimum..."
Asked why it called the police to the Yourshaw home, the hospice said its nurses "must obey
the laws" and state law "makes it a crime for someone to aid another in committing suicide."
Hospice records reveal Joe Yourshaw to have been a difficult patient, who at times refused
to take any medication. But the records also show Yourshaw repeatedly told hospice workers
that he suffered from "pain all over" and felt that "by living he is more of a burden
to his family."
Dr. Ira Byock: I think that this case is emblematic of how we are failing elders, chronically
ill people, vulnerable people in America.
Anderson Cooper: Failing how?
Dr. Ira Byock: In so many ways. We are, you know, not treating people's suffering. We
are making them feel undignified. Ask any boomer who's cared for their parents. They'll
tell you that even for those of us who are doctors and nurses, it's really, really hard
to get the basics of care for your frail loved one met.
Anderson Cooper: Barbara Mancini would say, well, if Pennsylvania had the kind of laws
that Oregon now has, which would have allowed her father to get some medicine that could
have ended his life, whether he chose to use it or not, that would have at least given
him a sense of peace.
Dr. Ira Byock: So what we're saying to Mr. Yourshaw is, "We're not going to treat your
pain. We're not going to train your doctors to counsel you. We're going to basically ignore
you. But don't worry, because if the time comes when you're feeling hopeless, we can
write that lethal prescription. In what world is that a progressive, positive development?
Anderson Cooper: Is it possible that your father swallowed that morphine because he
was in a lot of pain?
Barbara Mancini: Yes.
Anderson Cooper: And he didn't want to be a burden to your family rather than a real
desire to end his life?
Barbara Mancini: That certainly is quite possible.
Anderson Cooper: Well is that an argument for better end-of-life care?
Barbara Mancini: Absolutely.
Anderson Cooper: As opposed to, you know, death with dignity acts or...
Barbara Mancini: I don't know why better end-of-life care and death with dignity can't coexist.
Why not?
A year after Barbara Mancini was arrested, a state judge dismissed the charges against
her, ruling that the prosecution's case "appears to have been based on little independent investigation"
and "significant hearsay."
[Barbara Mancini: Good afternoon. My name is Barbara Mancini...]
Now that she's no longer facing prison time, she's able to testify about her experience
in states considering laws similar to Oregon's. She's back at work now, but told us she's
still struggling to come to terms with what happened to her father.
Barbara Mancini: There are some nights I lie awake in bed and I just relive this whole
thing. And less of it has to do with what happened to me. More of it has to do with
picturing him lying there in that ER crying out, knowing what I read in the hospital record.
Anderson Cooper: The way he died haunts you?
Barbara Mancini: Yes. Because the way his life ended was exactly the way he didn't want
it to end. With no control, in pain, having things done to him. And I feel terrible about it.
The Klondike, it's always been about gold since the first gold rush in the late nineteenth
century when miners stampeded into the Yukon, a pristine area in northwest Canada just east
of Alaska.
It's been more bust than boom since then but recently a new stream of money has been rushing
into the Yukon, largely because of the discoveries of one prospector.
He used to be a penniless trapper and mushroom picker but the gold he says he's found could
be worth billions.
And that might be just the beginning because the government has decided to open a whole
new stretch of wilderness to mining.
Miners and prospectors are a secretive lot, but we decided to take our chances and see
what's happening in the Yukon, a place that's changed very little since the first gold rush
over a hundred years ago.
It's one of the most remote stretches of wilderness in North America, home to more caribou than
people. Thousands cavort over the mountain tops in their annual migration. The Canadian
territory is bigger than California, but only 36 thousand people live here in scattered
communities like Dawson, a dirt-road town next to the Yukon River that was ground zero
for the first gold rush. There's an Old West feel to the town.
They still dance and gamble at Diamond Tooth Gertie's. Tourists and locals. You can tell
them apart. The tourists come here for the history and pan like the old timers.
A lot of real gold miners still work around town. They bring their discoveries in mason
jars and coffee cans to an unmarked shack. That's where Simon works. . .at home. He buys
miners' gold and melts it down. Anywhere else, there would be guards and guns, but Simon,
who asked us not to use his last name or reveal his address, just went about his business,
proving that gold doesn't really glitter until you give it a scrubbing and turn it into a
dazzling bar worth $200,000.
Bob Simon: Have you ever sort of calculated how much gold has passed through this shed
in the last 18 years?
Simon: Oh, I wouldn't want to comment on it, but it's been-- there's been a bit. Yeah.
Bob Simon: One guy we've been hanging out with says that he gives you about 10 million
bucks' worth a year. That's pretty good, huh?
Simon: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, he probably does.
Bob Simon: But why is everybody so secretive around here?
Simon: Well, who knows? You know, and it's like everybody's bank account. You know, you're
not going to flop your checkbook out in front of me and show me the balance.
In the last gold rush, 30,000 miners burst into Dawson. Some struck it rich. Many others
went broke or died. Dawson looks pretty much the same today. You can still see the old
miners' shacks near the aptly named Bonanza Creek, where the first gold was discovered.
It's called placer gold, the name used for river gold.
Shawn Ryan: The old prospectors would put a shaft down under the creek.
Shawn Ryan, a prospector, says a lot of placer gold has been mined here.
Shawn Ryan: They figure, at the turn of the century, there was somewhere between 13 and
20 million ounces of placer gold taken out of the Klondike.
Bob Simon: Which was worth what then?
Shawn Ryan: Right now that'd be worth well over, you know, between $13 billion and $20
billion worth of gold. At today's prices, so.
A hundred years later, they're still mining the same creeks and riverbanks.
The miners use back hoes now, not the gold pans you see in Clint Eastwood movies. Ian
Thomas is digging dirt that's already been mined once. He's looking for leftovers. His
equipment separates rock from dirt and then gives the dirt a bath to wash out the gold.
Bob Simon: How you doing?
Ian Thomas: We have good years, we have bad years.
Bob Simon: In other words, you don't really want to answer the question.
Ian Thomas: Not really.
Dave Miller also didn't want to tell us how much gold he finds, but he did show us the
Frisbee-like device he uses to separate his gold from dirt.
Bob Simon: That, I mean, that looks like gold.
Dave Miller: Yes. That is gold. That is placer gold. There's about two ounces of gold in
there.
Bob Simon: Okay.
Dave Miller: So that's $2,400. Give or take...
Bob Simon: This is 2,400 bucks?
Dave Miller: Yep.
Then Miller showed us the most valuable thing his family's found in 40 years: a three-ounce
nugget.
Bob Simon: Now that's impressive.
He'll let you hold it for a while, but just for a while. There are no free samples in
Dawson.
Dave Miller: We don't find too many nuggets anymore. This would be big stuff compared
to what we find today.
But prospector Shawn Ryan says he's found a lot of big stuff. And investors have poured
money into the Yukon because of him. Ryan doesn't dig up riverbanks. He prospects in
the mountains. It's more challenging and if you do it right, he says, infinitely more
lucrative.
Bob Simon: So now you're a multimillionaire. And look at you. You don't look like a multimillionaire.
Shawn Ryan: Well, listen, all I feel like is a squirrel that just found the big acorn
patch. And I got a bunch of acorns in the base of the tree. So you don't really change.
Not that long ago Shawn Ryan was dead broke. To survive he trapped animals and picked mushrooms.
He says you can make $50,000 a season picking these delectable morels. When we heard that
mushroom picking helped Ryan become a gold prospector, we went to track him down on a
steep, burned-out mountainside, where he still picks mushrooms for fun.
Shawn Ryan: Okay, into the mushroom patch. This was last year's fire.
Bob Simon: Started by lightning?
Shawn Ryan: Yeah.
Bob Simon: How do you know where to look?
Shawn Ryan: Well, that's where you research it. These mushrooms come one year after a
forest fire. And it only happens for a month. It's kind of like magic. They magically appear.
And it's only in that period of time in history. And then they go dormant for the next 200
or 300 years, or until the next forest fire.
The magic mushrooms got him through some pretty tough times.
Shawn Ryan: We lived in a 300 square foot shack. Turn of the century cabin, with no
running water or electricity.
Bob Simon: Were you warm enough in the wintertime?
Shawn Ryan: Pretty well. Sometimes your hair would get stuck to the back wall if it was
40 below.
When there was money to spare, Ryan could afford to do aerial surveys of charred forests.
He started researching soil quality, topography and the contour of the land. He found even
more mushrooms and discovered that the same research that helped him find the morels could
help him find gold.
Shawn Ryan: I actually give a lot of credit to my gold discoveries based on the mushroom
picking. Because I was able to understand, scientifically, the parameters of why these
mushrooms grow up here. And roughly how many are going to come out of each different fire.
Bob Simon: You say that you come to a place like this and there are no mushrooms, but
you have faith that they're going to pop up.
Shawn Ryan: That's exactly it.
Bob Simon: It must be quite a thrill.
Shawn Ryan: Well, it is and that's about the same thrill as predicting where gold is.
Shawn Ryan says all the gold found in the rivers had to come from somewhere, most likely
from the mountains, and that's where he has staked more than 50,000 claims.
He and his team walk the ridges and take soil samples they send to a lab for analysis. Finding
gold is always a long shot. And the unexpected can happen at any time.
Shawn Ryan: Oh...there's a bear right here. Hey! Hey! Ok. Where's your bear spray? Where's
the bear spray? Whoo ... yo bear! Hey... ha, ha, ha.
Groundtruth Crew Member: There he is...
Shawn Ryan: Look at the dog doesn't know...look the bear is trying to figure out. Oh, look
at this...Oh...
Groundtruth Crew Member: Go get him Ursa! Go get him!
Shawn and his team lucked out with the bear. All he has to do now is get lucky with the
soil.
Shawn Ryan: So the idea is that when we run these ridges...
He taught himself how to study maps and surveys and how to use a computer to help evaluate
his claim and try to find the hot spots.
Bob Simon: The pinks are where the pay dirt is.
Shawn Ryan: Yeah.
Bob Simon: Okay. But what percentage of hotspots actually will give you gold?
Shawn Ryan: I'd give that one in 10,000.
Bob Simon: Are you serious?
Shawn Ryan: I mean, because the probability, this is the only probability where the norm
is to fail.
To better his odds, Ryan and his team use a drone that makes a detailed aerial survey
of his claim. They also send electrical charges 300 feet into the ground to get more precise
physical data on where the gold might be located.
[Shawn Ryan: Whooo...ha, ha, ha...excellent!]
The images from the drone and the electric data help create a three-dimensional underground
virtual map, which helps pinpoint where to go digging.
Bob Simon: What are the odds that there's going to be gold there?
Shawn Ryan: Extremely high. Like pretty well, I could almost guarantee gold.
[Shawn Ryan: Well they got you with lots of samples...]
Shawn Ryan has become the biggest gold prospector in the Yukon and believes he's found seven
million ounces of gold. But he doesn't actually mine the gold himself. He options his claims
to larger companies and keeps a royalty. Ryan says he expects digging to begin in a few
years.
Bob Simon: Seven million ounces at today's gold prices, what would that be worth?
Shawn Ryan: It's probably close to $10 billion.
Bob Simon: Ten billion? But that's not for you?
Shawn Ryan: No.
Bob Simon: Out of that you'd only get one or two percent.
Shawn Ryan: That's right.
Bob Simon: And what would that make?
Shawn Ryan: Might be in... close to $100 million range.
Bob Simon: Yeah, that's our arithmetic as well.
Shawn Ryan: That's how your math is working.
It is math, but Shawn Ryan says it's also a poker game, a game miners like because it's
just another way of playing the odds.
Shawn Ryan: If you play one blackjack game the probability you're going to lose. If you
play 20, if I'm lucky two or three are going to be a winner.
Bob Simon: And that's enough?
Shawn Ryan: And that'll pay for the moose pasture that I walked over and didn't find
anything.
Bob Simon: Moose pasture being where there was nothing?
Shawn Ryan: Nothing, yeah just swamp.
But it's actually in the moose pastures and the caribou migration routes north of Dawson
where the next gold rush could take place. It's the Peel Watershed and is believed to
be rich in minerals.
Most of the Peel is part of the Yukon but you have to take a float plane to get there,
to the 26 thousand square miles of mountains and lakes that extend up to the Arctic Circle.
The government recently took the first steps to open most of the area to mining. Environmentalists
were furious. So was wilderness entrepreneur Chris Widrig. He takes hunters to shoot caribou
and the occasional grizzly. One of those grizzlies nearly killed him and left him scarred for
life.
Bob Simon: How much territory would the miners mine?
Chris Widrig: Too much. There's a frenzy, basically. You know, a gold frenzy. It's all
staked. They can't get across the border right now but, you know, they would like to.
To push back the miners, several groups have taken the government to court.
Bob Simon: What is it about this place?
Chris Widrig: It's wild. There's no roads for 100 miles. There's no development. There's
no towns. I think it's special...really.
In a replay of what once happened in America's Wild West, native Canadians, called the First
Nations, are fighting to protect what was originally theirs. Ed Champion is one of their
chiefs.
Bob Simon: Why do you feel so strongly about this?
Chief Ed Champion: Our people have been using this land. Have been traversing it, using
it for hunting, fishing, sustenance. And, you know, for many of our people it's been
their university. It's been their church. It's been home. Has been home.
Bob Simon: And once you're opening up, what, seventy percent of the land to the government
and what the government decides, you no longer have any control over what they do?
Chief Ed Champion: That's a major concern.
The biggest concern is that the wilderness would turn from this into this, an abandoned
mine just south of the Peel Watershed.
Chris Widrig: All it would take would be one road.
Bob Simon: The mining companies promise that they'll leave it as pristine as they found
it?
Chris Widrig: There's no such thing as a pristine mine that's been abandoned.
Shawn Ryan hopes the wilderness will be opened up for mining because it would create jobs.
But he is not going there. He is too much in love with the mushrooms around Dawson.
And believes that this is where he might just find what men have been searching for in the
Yukon for a hundred years.
Shawn Ryan: There's still this elusive source of the Klondike.
Bob Simon: The mother lode?
Shawn Ryan: Yeah. And nobody's ever found that yet. I'll tell you what keeps me up at
night. I fear to stop a mile short of the next ore deposit. So that's what keeps me
going.
Bob Simon: And now, after all this time, you still get a thrill?
Shawn Ryan: I get so excited sometimes. I feel like an eight year old on an Easter egg
hunt. You know, when you're out there and you find another Easter egg, well, there's
another Easter egg to be found.
It's estimated that Italy is home to two-thirds of the world's cultural treasures. Trouble
is, the country is too broke to keep its historic ruins, churches and monuments from crumbling
to dust. Italy is up to its neck in debt. Taxes go unpaid. Corruption in an overstuffed
bureaucracy is rife. But now some of its most treasured and endangered landmarks are being
saved, not by the government, but by a more respected Italian institution: the fashion
business. It's stepped in to rescue some of Italy's most iconic sites. Among them, the
very symbol of its rich, violent and inventive history: the Colosseum in Rome.
With its stunning, timeless sights, it's justifiably called the eternal city. A holy place to billions.
A vast landscape of the sacred and profane. An architectural delight, especially when
viewed at sunset.
And smack in the middle is the Colosseum, the greatest surviving wonder of the ancient
world, a memorial to the rise, decline and fall of imperial Rome. A place truly colossal.
Kimberly Bowes: We think it seats about 50,000 people. But this number depends on how wide
you think the Roman behind was. If you think that they had big behinds, then you calculate
less. Small behinds, you calculate more.
Backsides aside, Professor Kimberly Bowes is the director of the American Academy in
Rome and an expert on ancient Mediterranean history, who knows every inch of the Colosseum.
She's taking us to the very top level, far above where tourists tread, for a sight that
over the centuries very few people have seen first hand.
Kimberly Bowes: The view is terrifying! And the view is extraordinary. Look at this; this
is where the poor people sat. You really get the scale of this building here, though. Look
how big this is. Look how big this is! People are ants!
The place was built by the hands of slaves in just 10 years, finished a mere half century
after the crucifixion. The performers here were gladiators, wild animals, even comedians.
Morley Safer: I gather that this place was the entertainment center, the Broadway of
its day, yes?
Kimberly Bowes: In a way. The whole point is to produce marvels, to produce a spectacle
that would have amazed the audience.
Kimberly Bowes: The people with the most power, the senators, are down at the bottom. And
the people with the least power, the slaves and the women, are up at the top.
Morley Safer: Women?
Kimberly Bowes. Women. Like you don't want women to get too close to gladiators. You
have to keep them separate. Because your greatest fear, you have two fears if you're a Roman
man. One is that your slave is going to kill you one day in your bed. And your second fear
is that your wife is going to run off with a slave, like a gladiator. This is what everyone's
afraid of, so you've got to put the women up on the top.
Morley Safer: So even though the gladiators were slaves, they were kind of the movie stars
of their day.
Kimberly Bowes: They were.
And we turn to Hollywood for an idea of how it all might have looked.
Kimberly Bowes: There's a moment in "Gladiator" where Russell Crowe walks out to right where
we are.
Professor Bowes gives the filmmakers high marks for the historical accuracy of their
computer recreation of the Colosseum.
Kimberly Bowes: The whole drama is really the reenactment of Roman conquest. The continual
expansion of the empire.
Backstage was actually underground: the basement.
Kimberly Bowes: Until recently this was just filled with dirt.
A labyrinth of corridors: dungeons for slaves, cages for animals, all brought from the far
reaches of the empire. And wooden elevators, raised by ropes and pulleys, leading to trap
doors in the stage.
Kimberly Bowes: There's a wonderful scene in "Gladiator" where the tiger pops out of
the floor.
Kimberly Bowes: This is exactly the kind of thing that would have been used to wow the
audience.
Since the 18th century, the Roman Catholic Church has venerated the Colosseum as a symbol
of the early Christian martyrs who were put to death for their beliefs.
Professor Bowes tells visitors there were indeed early Christians quietly executed elsewhere
in Rome. But as for the Colosseum...
Kimberly Bowes: We have not one piece of evidence that any Christians were ever killed in this
building. Not one. There are, I think, really interesting reasons for this. If you take
a group of people who, by all accounts, are extraordinarily brave in the face of certain
death and you put them in this space and put them on display, who's everyone going to cheer
for? They're going to cheer for the Christians, right? Because they show such extraordinary
bravery. This is not a smart thing to do politically.
[Man: So I'm in the famous Colosseum...]
Six million tourists a year visit here, snapping selfies and posing with rent-a-gladiators
who pass the time with cigarettes and cell phones. The place has survived fires and earthquakes
over the centuries. Now there's a new crisis: finding the money to manage the crowds and
keep up with basic maintenance. The director of the Colosseum is Rossella Rea.
Rossella Rea: The money isn't there. There's very little, totally inadequate funding. Only
five percent of what we need.
Too little money and from the Italian parliament, too much red tape.
Morley Safer: A lot of people say the bureaucracy is so top heavy that that's the reason why
things don't get done.
Rossella Rea: Bureaucracy is not just heavy, it is extremely heavy. And we are the first
victims. Bureaucracy for us is a killer.
But that scaffolding you saw earlier is a sign that help is on the way. The Colosseum
is getting a badly needed facelift, with money from an unlikely source.
To prevent further ruin, a benefactor is spending an arm and a leg - $35 million - on a place
where, two thousand years ago, gladiators and slaves literally lost arms, legs and lives,
and all in the name of show business.
The benefactor is Diego Della Valle, a prominent Italian businessman, who knows a lot about
the business of showing. Della Valle is CEO of Tod's, the luxury leather goods company.
Crafting stylish shoes and bags has long been an Italian specialty. Having made his bundle,
Della Valle decided to give some back to the state.
Morley Safer: Why spend so much of your own money, millions upon millions, to fix this
wreck?
Diego Della Valle: Why not? Well, I am Italian. I am very proud to be Italian. And there is
a very famous Kennedy speech, no? Is the moment that what is possible for us to do for our
country, we need to do now.
The shoes that made Della Valle's fortune are assembled the old-fashioned way: by hand,
stitch by stitch. And the work he's funding at the Colosseum is also about as low tech
as it gets.
It's being cleaned literally inch by inch to get rid of centuries of caked-on dust,
grime, air and auto pollution. The stone is travertine, a kind of limestone. No chemicals
are allowed, only purified water and elbow grease: days, weeks, months, years on end
of scrubbing. Built by hand, saved by hand.
Morley Safer: How long is it going to take?
Diego Della Valle: The Colosseum, I think three years from now.
Morley Safer: And what will it look like, do you think, when they're finished.
Diego Della Valle: I am very curious.
To get some idea, we were shown a few sections that have been completely cleaned. Two thousand
years old, and looking almost brand new.
And in the world of high style, it's become fashionable to follow Della Valle's example.
An entire parade of fashionistas are bankrolling similar worthy causes. The Fendi fashion house
donated three-and-a-half million dollars for some new plumbing for a familiar waterworks.
It's the Trevi Fountain, where 54 years ago Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg went
wading, in Fellini's "La Dolce Vita," the sweet life. Forever linking Rome and romance.
Silvia Fendi: This movie helped a lot to build this powerful image of the Trevi Fountain.
Cinema has big power.
Silvia Fendi's grandfather started the business 90 years ago. And as we spoke, huge crowds
had a last chance to throw in a coin before the closing of the site for repairs.
Silvia Fendi: It means that you will be in good health in order to come back. So it's
very important for us. This country gave us a lot. And so it's nice at a point to give
back something.
Elsewhere in Rome, the Bulgari fashion house is paying to clean and repair the Spanish
Steps, where tourists stop to rest their feet. A Japanese fashion company with ties to Italy
is restoring the Pyramid of Cestius, built to honor a noble Roman two decades before
the birth of Christ, after the Roman conquest of Egypt. And in Venice, the four hundred
year old Rialto Bridge over the Grand Canal will be cleaned and strengthened, thanks to
seven million dollars from this.
[Man: Renzo Rosso.]
Morley Safer: Is the government too poor, too broke, to maintain its treasures?
Renzo Rosso: No, I think we have to face with the reality. The reality is that, they don't
have money.
Rosso is a farmer's son, a self-made man known as the jeans genius. As in Diesel jeans. He
built the brand from the ground up, expanding into other businesses and becoming a billionaire
several times over.
[Renzo Rosso: I want it more short.]
His sleek headquarters rival anything in Silicon Valley, what with the espresso bars and day
care, where kids learn the international language of business.
[Woman: Clap out ... clap in.]
But the fashion industry is a rare bright spot in the stagnant Italian economy. And
these workers are the lucky ones. Elsewhere, fully half the country's young adults are
unemployed. There's corruption, public and private, and widespread tax evasion.
Renzo Rosso: The Italian people are tired of this corruption. Because we have too many
people that steal, too many people that put the money in his pocket. We have 40 percent
of people who don't pay tax. Can you imagine? Forty percent. It's unbelievable.
Pope Francis talks about the problem in scathing terms, saying corrupt politicians, businessmen
and priests are everywhere. And the country's young new prime minister, Matteo Renzi, has
declared war on the political establishment, saying the whole system should be scrapped.
Diego Della Valle agrees.
Diego Della Valle: I think it's possible now to open a new way. The old point of view was
without any sense. I hope in the new point of view. I push for the new point of view.
But as Della Valle's scrubbers continue their work, it's worth noting that his generous
offer to restore the country's greatest monument was mired in the bureaucratic mud for nearly
three years before work could begin.
Kimberly Bowes: This is the real challenge that Italy has. This is why sites are closed
and monuments are falling down. The bureaucracy will have to change in order to actually make
it possible for someone to come and say, "Here, do you want $25 million?" Without the bureaucracy
saying, "Well, I don't know. I'll have to think about it."
But time has a way of standing still for Italians. Past glories are always present. The food
remains superb and the noble wines still lubricate the conversation. On the surface, it's still
la dolce vita. The sweet life. As for the future - that's somebody else's problem.