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I grew up in a small town between the border between Italy and Austria and we learned German in school. I planned to come to medical school, so my dad was planning on sending me to London to learn how to speak English—when I was 18 as a graduation award.”
Renato Calabria, MD, raises his head slightly to one side, as if pulled into a special memory. Around him are the trappings of a man whose practice takes him from Beverly Hills near Rodeo Drive to Rome and other locations in Italy in which to perform surgeries. His Beverly Hills office has a modern, crisply European feel to it.
“I had a great aunt who was visiting us in Italy from Pacific Palisades [Calif],” he continues. As he sits at his desk in a nicely apportioned private office, he adds, “She said, ‘What? Forget it. Send him to Los Angeles.’ So, that summer when I graduated from high school I spent 3 months in the summer in LA. I fell in love with it, and then I kept coming.”
Calabria’s father objected to the expense of regular trips to California. “I managed to formulate a way that I could come here on some externships, and my dad would never complain if it was an investment for education. I kept on coming for five summers in a row, doing some externships at UCLA, USC, etc. When I went back to Italy and I graduated from medical school, I did my internship there and so I kept my license there, which comes in handy now that I go back and do surgery there.”
After this, Calabria returned to the States and sought further training.
Back in the present in Beverly Hills, the afternoon sun grows hazy. Calabria has done what many are referring to as pioneering work in the use of adult stem cells in facial plastic surgery. The man runs a very successful boutique practice catering to a clientele of Hollywood stars. Nonetheless, he has retained his humility, built no doubt on the experiences in the United States that shaped his training.
Speaking in nostalgic tones, he describes the challenge of being a foreign medical student. “We’re talking about the early ’80s. There was already a plethora of people applying to residencies all over the country. For the foreign students, it was hard to get in,” he notes. “I started doing some research, a fellowship at UCLA Surgery, published some papers. Got my foot in the door.”
At the time, he planned to specialize in surgical oncology, with 2 years of pathology to get a background in surgical oncology followed by 5 years of general surgery. He did an externship in cardiac surgery, and soon thereafter an externship in plastic surgery at Saint Francis in San Francisco Medical Center.
The “duck came down,” and the magic words were plastic surgery. “I found my true calling,” he says.
Afterward, he put in another 3 years of training in plastic surgery in San Francisco, which he describes as “a fantastic program and really got me close to what I like to do best, which is cosmetic surgery,” he says. “We had a fantastic teaching staff. We were rotated through a number of teaching staff all over the city. We got a wonderful experience. In their training program [is] where I started doing facelifts.
“I did more than 20 facelifts on my own while I was in training, which is almost unheard of for a plastic surgery resident.
