Vado in Piscina, e me serve un certificato medico per attivita sportiva non-agonistica

I'm working on my 1000 mile swiming goal while we're here in Italy.  I found a pool about a 15-min bike or bus ride from our apartment.  It's a pretty nice 25-meter pool with 6 very wide lanes.  Everyone swims in  a circle, vs splitting the lane.  Most mornings I have been we've been about 10-20 lap swimmers with more men* than women.  The showers are the kind in a big room with no dividers (separate for men and women) and you can't turn them on and keep them on, you have to push a button every 30 seconds or so.  

The pool is part of the Football Club Bologna 1909 stadium complex.  Swimming here costs about half of what going to the YMCA in MN costs me, a year-long membership at the pool is only 350€.  
But there are other challenges!  If you want to be member, you need a certificato medico per attività sportiva non agonistica (a non-comeptitive sports activity medical certificate).
Getting this certificato medico means finding a doctor, which I was able to do by going through the private system (more on becoming fully legal here later).  My new doctor advised me that for this certificate I needed to get an Echo Cardiogram.  Yikes!  That seemed extreme to me.  He said it was no problem, I just needed to go to a pharmacy and tell them my doctor said I need an ECG, and they would help me for a small fee.

He was right.  I went to a pharmacy he recommended, they made an appointment for the following week, and when I came back they lead me into a little closet off to the side with about the same privacy and formailty I would expect from a vaccine clinic.  The pharmacist told me to take off my shirt and then covered the little suction cups from the machine with goo and stuck them all over me.  She had to do it twice because the device wasn't linked to the computer properly the first time, but about 20 min and 35€ later, I had a ECG printout.  Along with my visit to the doctor, the whole thing came to 55€ and kept me out of the pool for a week longer than I had hoped, but now I am all set for a year.

*picture speedos all around, no such thing as shorts here