ITALY: Elderly married couple writes pope’s Good Friday talk

ROME, Italy / Catholic News Agency / Religion News / March 29, 2012

Reflections for 2012 Good Friday stations draw on family life

By David Kerr

 

Danilo and Anna Maria Zanzucchi talk about their reflections for Good Friday. 
The Vatican asked 83-year-old Anna Maria and her 92-year-old husband 
Danilo to write this year’s stations.

Pope Benedict XVI’s meditations for the upcoming Good Friday Stations of the Cross ceremony have been written by an Italian couple that has been married for nearly 50 years.

“In all of the moments of the Stations of the Cross, there were special moments within us for the family,” Anna Maria Zanzucchi says.

“They were taken on by Jesus to redeem the family, and this was the strongest thing that we confronted, and the path that we have always followed illumined us, we were illuminated by the grace concentrated in the stations,” Anna Maria explained.

The traditional Catholic practice of praying the Stations of the Cross is done each Friday of Lent. The liturgy involves remembering and reflecting on 14 different moments in the passion and death of Jesus.

Traditionally, the Pope leads a procession of pilgrims in praying the stations on the evening of Good Friday at Rome’s Colosseum. At each station, the Pope recalls the particular moment of Christ’s passion and reads a reflection. This year, the meditations will come from the Zanzucchis.

The Vatican asked 83-year-old Anna Maria and her 92-year-old husband Danilo to write this year’s stations. The Zanzucchi’s explained that they compiled the prayers with the help of the Holy Spirit and their own experience of family life.

The couple has known each other since 1952, when Danilo proposed within a day of meeting Anna Maria. She said “yes” and they were married the following spring. They went on to have five children.

In 1967 they were asked by the founder of the Focolare Movement, Chiara Lubich, to help establish a new families’ movement. It aims to help families to “live the spirituality of unity and to spread throughout the world family values that promote universal brotherhood.”

“It is God who helps the family and society to rebuild themselves, to live as true men,” said Danilo.

He explained that if families “have this disposition of being ready to love others as oneself, for the love of God,” then “they put into practice the words of Jesus that wherever two or more are gathered in my name, I am with them.”

This, he said, is a “formidable resource to heal and aid people, without judging anyone because we are all poor people.”

“The family needs to be renewed, to be reinforced, to be united,” added Anna Maria.

“Unity is that love that unites, it is the impetus that forms families, but then humanity is such that – and we all know what can happen – we have arguments, misunderstandings, little things can become big.”

She explained that these obstacles can be overcome by love, which is used in turn to “renew the love that we all carry within.”

“It is like Danilo said, it is about renewing ourselves and then we can look to help others.”

Copyright © CNA
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Seniors World Chronicle, a not-for-profit, serves to chronicle and widen their reach.

ITALY: Milan banking on senior citizens

KOLKATA, India / The Statesman / February 15, 2012

By Robin Scott-Elliot


AGE Shall Not Weary Them has long seemed the unofficial motto of Milan. It is an ethos put into effective practice at the club's sheltered training ground, Milanello, in the hills some 50 kilometres outside the city, where it would be no surprise to discover a grey-haired, grizzled portrait of Paolo Maldini hidden in the basement beneath the players' lounge.


Photograph: Ryan Pierse/Getty 

This is, though, a very different Milan from the heyday of Maldini, Franco Baresi et al when European titles and Scudettos were returned to San Siro with enough regularity to satisfy even Silvio Berlusconi's prodigious appetite. 


The European Cup has not been seen - at least on the Rossoneri side of the stadium - for five years, and while the Serie A crown was regained last season it was a first for seven years. Memories of elimination by English clubs at the last-16 stage in their last three Champions League campaigns hang heavy. To continue reading, click here.


Copyright © 2012 The Statesman Limited.
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ITALY: Cross-party Protests over Parliamentary Pension Cuts

ROME, Italy / Corriere della Serra / Italian Life / December 1, 2011

One ploy – resign before rules are changed. Or take the state to court. Mazzocchi (PDL) says appeal is winnable: “You don’t change the rules halfway through the game”

ROME – “I don’t give a monkey’s about my pension but the change should start from 1945. The people who are proposing cuts have been in Parliament for decades”. A cross-party revolt is under way over cuts to parliamentarians’ pensions, or “lifetime allowances”. At the Chamber of Deputies bar, Massimo Calearo is giving voice to his fellow deputies’ outrage. Meanwhile Italy of Values’ (IDV) Antonio Borghesi rows against the flow of protest: “This reform is more of a penknife than a cleaver and in the short term it could cost taxpayers more”. That’s right. The IDV deputy group leader reckons that the Chamber’s contributions will cost about €25 million “paid by Parliament”.

The pension haircut has yet to be approved but Italy’s “Caste” is up in arms. The parliamentarians who are most indignant at Gianfranco Fini and Renato Schifani’s decision to raise the pension age and switch to the contributory system are the ones who were also reluctant to accept a technocratic government. That means former National Alliance and Forza Italia veterans. But the Democratic Party (PD) is also in ferment. Dario Franceschini warned parliamentarians against resigning to avoid postponement of their pensions. “If anyone is thinking of pulling a fast one, the Chamber just needs to reject the resignation”.

But a mass exodus from Parliament was the issue of the day in the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate. Former PD deputy Renzo Lusetti, now with the Christian Democrat UDC, said: “I’m not going to do it but at 53, I would be better off quitting right now, otherwise I’ll get the lifetime allowance when I’m 60”. Others are looking at ways of appealing. Serjeant-at-arms Antonio Mazzocchi (photo above), a lawyer and PDL deputy, thinks they stand a good chance of winning: “If they change the rules during the game and deputies take the state to court, I think they could win”. At 11.30 am, the issue will be discussed by the serjeants-at-arms and social security experts from the parties, including Cazzola (PDL), Gnecchi (PD) and Galletti (UDC). A battle royal looms. Serjeant-at-arms Gabriele Albonetti (PD) takes another view: “Mazzocchi is speaking for himself. He agreed at the meeting with Fini, Schifani and minister Fornero. Raising the age and the contributory system are done deals. There’s no going back”.

Alessandra Mussolini (PDL) is prepared to make sacrifices if the members of the Monti government first “provide information on their conflicts of interest”. Francesco Boccia (PD) was exercised about “discrimination” against young people: “We are furious. Fini and Schifani shouldn’t think they can carry out this operation on the backs of future generations”. Long-serving deputies are worried, as are above all newly elected members, whose lifetime allowances are set to shrink under the contributory system. 

Former People and Territory (PET) deputy Mario Pepe was incandescent: “Starving deputies and senators is making Parliament a slave to the strong powers”. “Starving”, deputy? “Yes because if you take away the lifetime allowance from someone like [former Communist Refoundation party secretary Fausto – Trans.] Bertinotti, what has he got left?” Fighting talk, but you get the idea.

Over in the Senate, some diehards are refusing to lie down. A meeting of group leaders that was supposed to be brief lasted for two and a half hours, so high were tempers running over the lifetime allowances. Luigi Lusi (PD) attacked the social security “jungle” and proposed a special fund for “all constitutional bodies”, which would include ministers and junior ministers as well as parliamentarians.

Monica Guerzoni
01 dicembre 2011English translation by Giles Watsonwww.watson.it

Copyright 2011 © RCS Quotidiani Spa
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Seniors World Chronicle, a not-for-profit, serves to chronicle and widen their reach.

ITALY: Population Decline Catalyst For Economic Decline

LOS ANGELES, California / Investors' Business Daily / Editorials / November 18, 2011

VIEWPOINT

Italy has an absolute decline in the size of  workforce

By CARL ANDERSON 

Italy's problems have revealed the extent of the euro zone crisis.

Following the collapses in Portugal, Ireland and Greece, and with Italy teetering, the dream of a stable European monetary system is now over. And central to Italy's implosion is its negative population growth — an important lesson for a continent whose citizens are aging at an ever faster rate.

Population growth doomsayers from Thomas Malthus onward — who have claimed that population increases will lead to resource scarcity and disaster — have widely missed the mark, though such predictions continue. And few issues today are as highly ideological and politicized as family planning.

In Europe, population decline — not population growth — has proven a strong catalyst for economic decline.

Italy — along with most of Europe, as some commentators have noted — now faces a perfect storm. Growth is hindered by an ever-increasing debt burden, by a decrease in creative and energetic young workers and by an increasingly older population that has a great stake in preserving entitlement spending. Furthermore, GDP is unlikely to grow significantly while the work force shrinks.

With all of these scenarios in play, sustainable growth in Italy — and Europe — seems unrealistic in the foreseeable future.

With Europe's demographic issues, it is worth revisiting the work of economist Julian Simon. Decades ago, he made the case that people were "the ultimate resource," writing in his book by that name: "The standard of living has risen along with the size of the world's population since the beginning of recorded time." He added: "There is no convincing economic reason why these trends toward a better life should not continue indefinitely."

In the political world, Simon's contemporary, Ronald Reagan, also took a balanced view of population growth.

In 1984, James Buckley, Reagan's representative to the Conference on Population in Mexico City said: "First, and foremost, population growth is, of itself, neither good nor bad. It becomes an asset or a problem in conjunction with other factors, such as economic policy, social constraints and the ability to put additional men and women to useful work. People, after all, are producers as well as consumers."

Population decline is a different matter.

To have producers or consumers, a country must have people — and they are increasingly in short supply in Europe. Italy's birthrate is now estimated at 1.39, and a 2007 National Institute on Aging study noted that Italy — along with France, Germany, Greece, Russia and the Ukraine — has already "seen an absolute decline in the size of their workforce."

© 2000-2011 Investor's Business Daily, Inc
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ITALY: Court help sought to get Italian man, 41, to leave the nest

VENICE, Italy  / Agence France Presse / Entertainment News / September 21, 2011

The sun sets in Venice. AFP Photo

After several failed attempts to convince their 41-year-old son to leave the nest, a Venetian couple have hired a lawyer in a last resort bid for domestic peace and quiet, Italian media reported Tuesday.

The parents, whose names were not published, were said to be exhausted by fending for their adult offspring, cooking his meals and doing his washing and ironing.

"We cannot do it anymore. My wife is suffering from stress and had to be hospitalised," said the father, who approached the legal department of a consumer association, ADICO, for help.

The son "has a good job but still lives at home. He demands that his clothes be washed and ironed and his meals prepared. He really has no intention of leaving."

Reports said the son also had aggressive tendencies.

ADICO lawyer Andrea Camp said a letter was sent to the son, advising him to leave the house within six days or face legal action.

If he refuses, lawyers will ask a court to issue a protection order to the parents against their son.

ADICO says hundreds of Italian families face similar difficulty getting rid of their adult children.

The latest couple turned to ADICO two weeks ago after hearing of a similar case in which the association had convinced a son to abandon the family cocoon -- after which his parents changed the locks.

© 2011 AFP / Copyright © 2011 Yahoo! Inc
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ITALY: Two Sisters Live in Car for Eight Months

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MILAN / Corriere della Sera / Italian Life / May 12, 2011

When evicted: "We smashed furniture so gypsies wouldn’t get it”

Elvira Serra 
TRIESTE

The sisters weren’t crying on the October day when they took a hammer to their past. Eight months ago, they destroyed their father’s bed, the head panel and the mattresses, then went on to the sitting room sofas, the kitchen units and the bathroom cabinet.

“We didn’t want to leave anything behind in case it was given to a family of Roma gypsies, which was what happened to the lady on the floor below”.

The two women had already shed tears in abundance on 29 July, when the bailiff told them the eviction could no longer be postponed.

“We bundled our lives into a few parcels and stacked them away in a room at a childhood friend’s home. We broke up the furniture. We could have taken it away on 1 October, when we went back for the last time to the home we grew up in, but we didn't have anywhere to store it. We destroyed our possessions out of anger and frustration. If nothing else, it was something we could do”.

Cristina and Laura Di Sessa, 41 and 45 (Photo above), tell their story without emotion as they sit on a bench in Piazza Unità d’Italia in Trieste. It is the story they told in a handwritten letter, the sort almost no one writes any more, that reached the Corriere della Sera a few days ago.

Their father, a retired Carabiniere, died from a rectal tumour in 2008. The sisters spent three months caring for him only to watch him slip away. It was an experience they had already undergone as adolescents, when their mother took three months to die from lung cancer. Grief for their father was followed by financial trouble. Up till then, both had only had short-term employment yet using their savings, they managed to pay the €430 a month rent to the landlord, Lloyd Adriatico (now the Allianz insurance group), until June 2009.

Three months later, the insurance company sent a lawyer’s letter to say they were taking the sisters to court and in July 2010, the date on which the eviction order would become enforceable was set: 8 September.

Cristina recalls: “It was midday. There were six of them: the lawyers, the court doctor, the social worker and the locksmiths. For now, a neighbour is putting us up but we can’t stay. We’re sleeping on her kitchen floor. We move the table aside and put down a quilt. In the morning, we’re awake early to tidy up and get out. We can’t stay there during the day”.

Laura goes on: “We wash ourselves one bit at a time. We don’t have keys so we’re not free to come and go. In the evening, we go back when they’ve finished their dinner. For the rest of the day, we look everywhere for odd jobs, anything at all”.

When the Bora gales were blowing during the winter, the sisters used to go the Torri shopping centre opposite the new port. Now Cristina and Laura go to the car park where their old car, a no longer roadworthy Alfa 133, is parked up. Under the tablecloths that cover the vehicle, there are boxes of novels and university textbooks, some nail varnish on the dashboard, three pots of nail varnish remover, a carton of apricot juice and a pack of croissants.

“I used to read six books a month. When I dropped out of university, I had already started a thesis in fish biology, ‘Growth and Development of Carpet Shells in the Gulf of Trieste’”, says Cristina. Then she worked as a shop assistant and a cleaner in a chemist’s, and gave private maths lessons to schoolkids. Laura has a more substantial CV thanks to her technical-commercial secondary-school diploma:

“I stood in for women on maternity leave in the regional authority, the health authority, architects’ practices and law firms”.

In recent months, the sisters have asked relatives and social services for help but to no avail. They have written several times to the president of Italy, Giorgio Napolitano, who has unfailingly replied and in January even sent a cheque for them to the prefecture. They also appealed to the national Carabinieri association and the general command gave them a donation.

“But we want a job. We’re quite willing to leave Trieste, provided we can stay together. We’re asking to be able to give some meaning to our days, and find a home we can come back in the evening, switch on the TV, open the fridge to see what shopping’s needed and do our washing and ironing”.

What they’re asking for is a life with dignity.

English translation by Giles Watson
http://www.watson.it/

Copyright 2011 © RCS Quotidiani Spa

ITALY: Paolo Rumiz, soul without frontiers

PARIS, France / Le Figaro / Books and Music / April 22, 2011

Literature

Traveller, writer and journalist. Italian, Balkan and a little bit Slavic too.  Paolo Rumiz is all these things at the same time, this man who has passed through the upheavals of Europe and got it all down in booksof highly personal tales.  Hoëbeke

By Christine Fauvet-Mycia
 
Rumiz is on familiar terms with Europe’s frontiers. And he always has been. Those borders came down around him starting the very night in 1947 (December 20, 1947) when he was born in Trieste, when this small fragment of land along the Adriatic which had seen the splendour of the Austro-Hungarian empire, before joining Italy for some years after the errors and follies of the Second World War, became the “Free Territory of Trieste”.

“I remember the faces of the communist cops at the border and the Yugoslav women coming in from the countryside carrying their jugs ​of milk on their heads. For my parents this border was a nightmare. For me it was simply an invitation to wander, a line beyond which the mystery began.”

This curiosity, this desire to head out the door and roam, never left Paolo Rumiz. His longest journey was a zigzag along the eastern borders of the European Union, from the Barents Sea to the Black Sea. Thirty-three days, ten countries, some 6,000 kilometres on foot, by bus, by train, hitchhiking, catching rides on barges, carrying six kilos of luggage stripped of superfluous ballast – and seven notebooks.

That narrative was the first by this Italian travel writer to be published in France. A journey from top to bottom across a Europe that he found to be higher than it was wide, a journey he set out on to get as close as he could to the soul of the Slavic people of the east. It was beautiful writing suffused with shadows and sun, bathed in love and melancholia, steeped in delicate and powerful fragrances.

The fall of communism, the break-up of Yugoslavia and the Balkan wars

And etched with faces and stories whispered during encounters with the Sami, the last reindeer herders in the Kola Peninsula; with Father Leonid, who had been a soldier in the Russian special forces; with Alexander, a tender-hearted orphan tormented by the fear of what awaited him after two years in prison; with the monks of Solovki islands; with Mariusz, a man-wolf who slept on his stove in a house lost in the shadow of the chapel of the patron saint of vagabonds; with the magician of blinis (small, yeast-leavened, buckwheat pancakes originally from Russia); with reticent Estonians, Latvian choirs, with Old Believers on the shores of Lake Peipus; with Rita and Volodya, marked down once for all as “foreigners”, stamped in their passports; with ambitious young officers in Kaliningrad; and with Lilia, who keeps watch over an old Jewish cemetery.

The stories piece together again an atlas that has been erased by modern states, restore souls to territories that have been lost. Bothnia, Karelia, Livonia, Courland, Latgalia, Masuria, Polesie, Volhynia, Ruthenia, Podolia, Bukovina, Boudjak (between the mouth of the Danube and the lower Dniester), Bessarabia, Dobruja – all these “ancient border provinces engulfed by geopolitics”.

“A tidepool of humanity,” says Paolo Rumiz, who claims a “plural identity: Slavic in the soul, German in my approach to culture, Italian in my language – and a little bit French,” since his first journeys were made through France and he has been inspired by tales of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Nicolas Bouvier and Bernard Moitessier.

He wrote his first story at age 21. But above all, for many years, working for Il Piccolo, the Trieste newspaper, he followed the fall of communism, the break-up of the former Yugoslavia and the Balkan wars.

“Clinging to the northern extremity of the Mediterranean Sea, Trieste, my city, is a seismograph, a balustrade looking out to far horizons. In the cafes it was natural to talk about what was happening abroad. Men born in my era were raised on the bread of geopolitics.”

Journalism is not always the truth

This journey to the borders of Europe Paolo Rumiz decided to set out on soon after his 60th birthday in 2007. After a night of partying to celebrate the Schengen accord, when the border around Trieste opened and the last of the Iron Curtain that symbolised the separation of Slovenia was dismantled, he realised that he was going to miss something: “the dream, the line of shadow waiting to be crossed, the feeling of the forbidden.” Then “like a salmon heading up a river,” he struck out “towards the Slavic soul.”

His travelogue will be serialised in La Repubblica. Since 2001, it has been a ritual. One month from now, Paolo Rumiz will set out on his eleventh journey for the Italian daily. The travel writing, however, fails to heal the wound left by the Balkan wars he reported on.

“I felt betrayed by the blindness of Europe towards the Balkans – especially to Bosnia, where we wanted to see only Islamists where in fact there were Europeans with a Turkish culture.

"This powerlessness to explain, this helplessness in the face of violence against innocent people made me sick, physically. I always feel I owe something to the poor Bosnians. Later I wrote a story in verse on Bosnia, a love story that plays out from the end of the war up to 2002. Readers have grasped the poetry in a way they never understood the war correspondence.

"Journalism is not always the truth. Sometimes we must find another language. And so I found this decasyllable (a ten-syllable verse or word) that touched the soul. I could say things that in my entire life as a reporter I had failed to understand. Today, I am like a tightrope walker, walking between the truth of journalism and the transfiguration of poetry and fiction.”

Copyright 2009 Presseurop.eu

ITALY: Not enough help for the homeless

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Rome / WantedInRome.com / Articles / March 30, 2011

Figures for the homeless vary but what is certain is that there aren't enough beds for them all

By Bija Knowles

I wait for the last train from Termini on Friday night and a man, probably in his 60s but looking older, asks me if the train goes to Civitavecchia. Yes, I say, it's the last stop. We get on the train and he sits opposite me, offering me a tic-tac. He's homeless and wants to go to Florence, where he can work as a street artist. He shows me his pictures, which are child-like pencil drawings. He has a bad cough and as I get off at my stop half an hour later, I think of him with guilt, about to spend a cold night in a dark and lonely station.


It's a desperate story repeated many thousands of times across the country. In Rome alone there are between 6,000 and 8,000 people with no fixed abode according to a June 2010 report based on figures from the Catholic relief organisation Caritas and the Christian community of S. Egidio.

With night-time temperatures in Rome dipping as low as -6° in December 2010 and hovering around zero for most of January and February this year, sleeping on the streets is not for the vulnerable, weak or old. Unfortunately, these are often the people you see huddling in sleeping bags and blankets at stations such as Termini, Ostiense and Tiburtina, in improvised tents along the Tiber, on steps and along railway lines: men and women, some old and in need of healthcare and assistance. One third of Rome's homeless are thought to be political refugees and asylum seekers.

Caritas, S. Egidio, churches and voluntary organisations offer services for the homeless. There are 33 canteens open in the evening and 36 official hostels or dormitories. But it's not enough. Mario Marazziti, spokesman for S. Egidio, was recently quoted as saying that there are only 2,700 places in the hostels run by the city and the voluntary sector, about 1,000 homeless are in make-shift camps in the city's suburbs and the rest are left to rough it on the streets.

So Rome has a huge problem on its hands. Fabrizio Schedid is the coordinator at Binario 95, a day centre for people with no fixed abode at Termini station. Does he think the services and infrastructure for homeless people in Rome are sufficient? "Absolutely not. A person asking for a place in a dormitory has to wait six months. You only have to walk around the streets to see that the problem is not being dealt with by the services provided."

One of the main difficulties, according to Schedid, is that the authorities do not know the size of the problem. While a count of people sleeping in Rome's stations on 17 October 2010 came up with the figure 383, this in no way tallies with the estimated 2,700 referred to by Mario Marazziti from S. Egidio. Schedid explains: "As there has never been a comprehensive headcount of people sleeping rough, the scale of the problem hasn't been quantified and therefore it cannot be adequately addressed."

While an extra 650 hostel places are made available during the cold period from December to March, these emergency winter beds are closed on 31 March. It's a grim April Fool that from 1 April onwards these people will be on the streets again.

The difficulties of homelessness don't stop if you are lucky enough to have a bed in one of the city's hostels. Some dormitories sleep scores of people in one open space while others have small windowless rooms sleeping four people in bunk beds. Some accommodation is without hot water or heating.

One of the misconceptions you often hear from the general public is that homeless people have chosen this life. Schedid sighs: "There is a lot of ignorance about homeless people and of course most of them do not choose to live like that." The factors that lead people to lose their homes vary and the catalyst is often a misfortune that could happen to anyone, such as losing a job, an eviction, an illness, a bereavement or domestic problems. These situations can, in turn, lead to loneliness, depression, poverty, drug use and the break-up of a person's network of friends and family.

The first port of call for anyone without a home in Rome is the 24-hour hotline – 800 440022 – run by the city's emergency advice centre. Any member of the public who sees someone sleeping rough in need of help can also call this number. The help centre on platform one at Termini station also gives advice and directions. The people who passed through there in January 2011 give some indication of the demographics of Rome's senza fissa dimora: 83 per cent were male and 17 per cent female; 81 per cent were non-Italian and 19 per cent Italian; nearly half were aged 30-49.

Another complicating factor is that some hostel beds are occupied on a long-term basis by people who have found their way off the streets, but have not been able to move on from the temporary accommodation. Rome-born Daniele at Binario 95 in Termini station said he has been staying at a hostel on Via Marsala since 2005. In the 1990s he was a chef before he began sleeping rough in a van or in a supermarket storage cupboard. He now goes to the day centre to rest after a night in the hostel and an early start working at a market.

Daniele says: "It's a life where the day-to-day things dominate – and every day there are new problems. One of the most difficult things is that you are in constant contact with other people at the hostel so getting on well with others is important. You also have to look out for others, especially older people."

Day centres such as Binario 95 provide important resources that make a huge difference, including a warm and welcoming atmosphere where people can talk, wash clothes, learn skills or just relax.

However, the cheerful home-made cushions and welcoming smiles at the day centre belie some harsh realities. The centre's coordinator, Schedid admits: "We try to remove obstacles for people where we can but sometimes you have to accept that there is no ideal solution. To do social work in Italy, you have to really believe in what you're doing."

About the Author

Bija Knowles is a freelance journalist based outside Rome, Italy.

She graduated in Italian and English Literature from the

University of Birmingham, UK,

and her main areas of interest are art, travel and history in Italy.

ITALY: How I met Zio Matteo

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SERSALE, Southern Italy / Watercolors / October 21,  2010

Zio Matteo
By Mimi Torchia Boothby
of Watercolors

I am of Italian heritage and I still have a lot of ties with the small town in southern Italy, Sersale, where my grandfather was born. Last summer I read a blogger’s tale about an old man who lives in Sersale, named Matteo Torchia, who celebrated his 100th birthday last April.

The town threw him a big party and there was a fuzzy, blurry, little video of him in this huge hall full of people dancing. The video is here.

I decided I was going to find this man, who if still alive, would be 101 years old. After all, not only is he the oldest guy in Sersale, but he is probably the oldest Torchia alive in the world as well, and that happens to be my surname.

I never met a centenarian before and it seemed rather poetic that the first one I would ever meet was a guy with my own last name.

So when I got there this September, I started asking around. I asked my cousin Santina about him; she had never heard of the guy. Zio Matteo? But she liked the idea and started asking others as they arrived to greet me, did you ever hear about this guy who is 101?

One of the younger cousins spoke up, “My little boy saw him in school, I’ll ask him if he knows where Zio Matteo lives.”

The next day, I was given more information; truly, all the cousins liked the idea that I wanted to look for this man and I was informed that he hung out up in the piazza near the pharmacy, so I headed up to that neighborhood.

Sersale is a small hill town, the only places to be found that are flat are the piazzas. All the streets are very steep and curvy, and most of them are too narrow for me to drive a car in, so all of this coming and going is on foot.

There was a bit of confusion about him; I knew him as Zio Matteo, (Uncle Matteo) but even though his name is actually Matteo, in dialect he is called Mattia di Paola. So when I originally asked about Zio Matteo no one except the young people knew who I was talking about because everyone else in this town speaks only dialect.

Anyway, the first day I went up to that piazza looking for him, the road was being repaired, and there were no old men out at all, so I gave up. The next day I returned and asked some people if Zio Matteo had been there today, and no one had seen him (did they actually understood who I was looking for?).

On the third day, someone pointed out the exact spot where Zio Matteo and his friends usually sat; and I could see three old guys were up there so I hustled over to this bench overlooking a cliff with a tree shading it and asked them if they knew where Mattia di Paola was. One old guy told another that he must take me to Zio Matteo's house.

This very strange man who walked like a chicken with his head thrust forward led me into a part of Sersale that I had never seen before called La Colla, the oldest part of the town. It had streets that were extremely steep and narrow, where in parts you can touch the walls of houses on both sides of the street at the same time.

Finally after a lot of twists and turns and ups and downs, we were there. 30 was the street number above the door. This tiny little blue eyed old man walks out, perky and bright, and the weird guy that led me there disappeared into the maze of streets.

“Yes,” he says, “I am Matteo Torchia,” and I told him “I am a Torchia too!”

I told him our family’s nickname (Cristariella) and his eyes lit up and and he started reciting the names of my grandfather's siblings - he knew them all. He even knew that my grandfather never returned from from America to visit.

He told me how he survived the Spanish Flu in 1918 but that his mother died. He told me a good deal of his life history, he has been interviewed a lot recently, so he was prepared.

Finally, he stood and looked at me as if to say;”I’m one hundred and one years old, I don’t have a lot of time to waste, what was it you would like to know?”

So I asked him what did he eat that enabled him to live so long. He responded with gusto; “EVERYTHING! “I eat meat, pasta, beans, vegetables, coffee, wine, everything, everything!”

The only thing he doesn’t do is smoke. I asked him if I could take his picture, and he said, “Ok, just one.”

I shook his hands and said farewell and spent the next 20 minutes trying to get back down to some place I was familiar with because I was completely lost.

All I could say after I left him was "Che Carino!"
(how cute!)
 
By Courtesy of  Ronni Bennett
TIME GOES BY / The Elder Storytelling Page

ITALY: George Clooney claims Italy changed his life

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SYDNEY, NSW, Australia / The Sydney Morning Herald / Life & Style / People / September 3, 2010

George Clooney claims Italy changed his life

The actor – who has been dating Italian television presenter Elisabetta Canalis for more than a year – admits he feels much less stressed since buying a villa in the European town of Laglio as he can escape the pressures of Hollywood.

He said: "What changed my life in a very pleasant and unexpected way was buying the villa in Laglio. That was a pure investment decision – I thought I would maybe spend a few weeks vacationing there.

"But then I realised how beautiful life was in Italy and how it really helped calm me and not feel so pressured. I could also work productively and bring my friends over to keep me company."

The 49-year-old bachelor - who has had a series of short term relationships since his divorce from actress Talia Balsam in 1993 – also admitted he has previously put his career before his personal life but is happy to have now changed his priorities.

Clooney added in an interview with the Daily Mirror newspaper: "I was working so hard on my film projects that for a time I basically didn't even think very much about how my personal life was evolving.

"I didn't care in the sense that I didn't have a family or children to look after and I wasn't involved in any long-term relationships.

"Now, I still feel I haven't done my best work although I've at least put myself in a position where I can keep doing what I love and enjoy the process.

"I even have a bit of a personal life these days. I don't want to make anyone sick but things are going pretty well for me." - Bang Showbiz

Copyright © 2010 Fairfax Media

ITALY: Silvio Berlusconi backs anti-ageing company

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LONDON, England / The Telegraph / World News / Italy / June 2, 2010

Silvio Berlusconi has thrown his support behind two companies researching ways to fight ageing and seeking a cure for cancer.

By Nick Squires in Rome

Mr Berlusconi - pictured with two unidentified women - boasts of his energy and his ability to function on just a few hours sleep Photo: AP

The famously looks-conscious Italian prime minister, 73, who has overcome prostate cancer and a heart condition, has become the biggest investor in Milan-based Molecular Medicine, a biotechnology company that is in the advanced stages of testing two cancer drugs.

He now owns almost a quarter of the company and has had his youngest son Luigi, 21, installed onto the board. Mr Berlusconi's holding is estimated to be worth more than 40 million euros (£33 million).

He also backs the company's second biggest shareholder, the Milan-based foundation San Raffaele del Monte Tabor, which plans to build a 150 million euro (£125 million) research and treatment centre this year devoted to fending off the effects of ageing.

It will be called "Quo Vadis" and will focus on preventing and curing the diseases of old age and studying the beneficial effects of nutrition and exercise.

Mr Berlusconi, who boasts of his energy and his ability to function on just a few hours sleep a night, has been described by his personal doctor as "the most extraordinary psychophysical subject I have ever examined." Umberto Scapagnini claims that the prime minister is in such good shape that he has the constitution and sexual appetite of a man 15 years younger. He has said that he hopes to be able to keep Mr Berlusconi alive until the age of 120.

In 2004 Dr Scapagnini said he had formulated for Mr Berlusconi a special elixir based on the diet of "centenarians I met on the Silk Road south of Urumqi and in the oases between the Taklamakan and Gobi deserts".

At a political rally in Rome in March, the prime minister predicted that a cure for cancer would be found before his term in office ends in 2013 and that he believes science has the capability of raising the average life expectancy to 120.

"So maybe in 100 years, I'll think of a successor," he joked.

Mr Berlusconi, who has no clear political successor to take charge of his People of Freedom coalition, is reported to have his sights set on becoming Italy's president after his term as prime minister ends in three years' time.

© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2010

ITALY: At-home care vis-a-vis hospital care for elderly chronic heart failure patients

. CHEVY CHASE, Maryland / Science Daily September 29, 2009 Hospital-at-home care may be a practical alternative to traditional hospital inpatient care for patients with acutely decompensated (suddenly worsening) chronic heart failure, according to a report in the September 28 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine. Nearly 7 million Europeans and 5 million North Americans are affected by chronic heart failure, a progressive and disabling syndrome. Hospitalization for chronic heart failure for older patients has increased and occurs in 2 percent to 3 percent of patients over age 85 every year. In the United States, worsening of chronic heart failure leads to more than 1 million hospital admissions per year and a 50 percent risk of subsequent hospitalization within six months of discharge. "Although the hospital is the standard venue for providing acute medical care, it may be hazardous for older persons, who commonly experience iatrogenic illness [complications due to treatment], functional decline and other adverse events." Vittoria Tibaldi, M.D., Ph.D., and colleagues at the University of Torino, San Giovanni Battista Hospital, Torino, Italy, compared the effectiveness of a physician-led hospital-at-home service for elderly patients with acute decompensation of chronic heart failure with traditional hospital inpatient care. Patients age 75 or older with decompensation of chronic heart failure were randomly assigned to either a general medical ward (53 patients) or to the Geriatric Home Hospitalization Service (48 patients) between April 2004 and April 2005. The Geriatric Home Hospitalization Service provided diagnostic and therapeutic treatments by hospital health care professionals in the home of the patient. At six months, 15 percent of all patients had died, with no significant differences between the two groups. "The number of subsequent hospital admissions was not statistically different in the two groups, but the mean [average] time to first additional admission was longer for the Geriatric Home Hospitalization Service patients (84.3 days vs. 69.8 days). Only the Geriatric Home Hospitalization Service patients experienced improvements in depression, nutritional status and quality-of-life scores," the authors write. "Recent trends in health care favor alternatives to traditional acute care in hospitals. These trends include advancement in telehealth technologies and increased demand for treatment at home," the authors conclude. "Further development of hospital-at-home care will require additional research and dedicated resources to support dissemination." [rc] Journal reference: Vittoria Tibaldi; Gianluca Isaia; Carla Scarafiotti; Federico Gariglio; Mauro Zanocchi; Mario Bo; Serena Bergerone; Nicoletta Aimonino Ricauda. Hospital at Home for Elderly Patients With Acute Decompensation of Chronic Heart Failure: A Prospective Randomized Controlled Trial. Arch Intern Med, 2009; 169 (17): 1569-1575 JAMA and Archives Journals (2009, September 29). At-home Care May Be An Alternative To Hospital Care For Elderly Patients With Chronic Heart Failure. ScienceDaily. Copyright © 1995-2009 ScienceDaily LLC

ITALY: Twins of 65 in standoff with police

. MONSELICE, Italy / The Earth Times / Deutsche Presse Agentur / July 25, 2009

A two-day standoff between authorities in Italy and two elderly twins ended peacefully Saturday when police entered the house in which the pair had barricaded themselves. The 65-year-old brothers had threatened to use petrol bombs to prevent one of them from being returned to a psychiatric clinic.

But at around noon on Saturday, Luciano Guglielmo, left the house in the north-eastern town of Monselice, and allowed paramedics to escort him to a nearby hospital, news reports said. About an hour later, his brother, Flavio, surrendered to police. Officials cited by the ANSA news agency, said that a number of Molotov cocktail-type petrol bombs were found in the house.

According to Italian news reports, the brothers are in poor health and have both been treated for depression in the past. [rc]

© 2009 The Earth Times

ITALY: Alzheimer's increasing among 'oldest old,' researchers say

. VIENNA, Austria / United Press International / Health News / July 14, 2009

 Cases of Alzheimer's and dementia, in contradiction of conventional wisdom, continue to rise among the very old, researchers in Italy said.

Previous epidemiological studies have suggested the number of people with Alzheimer's and dementia begins to level off and perhaps even go down a bit in people age 90 and above, known as the "oldest old."

Ugo Lucca -- head of the Laboratory of Geriatric Neuropsychiatry at the Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research in Milan, Italy -- and colleagues conducted a door-to-door, population-based study of all people age 80 or older in eight municipalities of Varese province, Italy, roughly 20 miles north of Milan. 

The researchers gathered information and an initial dementia evaluation for 2,138 people. The mean age at the first evaluation was 87.5 years and 74.1 percent of subjects were women. After an average follow-up period of three years, of the 1,085 survivors non-demented at baseline, 995 were re-evaluated for dementia. Prevalence of dementia standardized on the 2008 Italian population was 22.9 percent and was higher in women at 25.8 percent than in men at 17.1 percent. Prevalence increased with advancing age: -- 13.5 percent at 80-84 years. -- 30.8 percent at 85-89 years. -- 39.5 percent at 90-94 years. -- 52.8 percent over age 94. The findings were presented at the Alzheimer's Association International Conference on Alzheimer's Disease in Vienna. [rc]

© 2009 United Press International, Inc.

ITALY: Europe's oldest person dies at 113

. KARACHI, Pakistan / The News International / June 28, 2009

ROME, Italy (ANSA)

The oldest person in Europe, Italian Lucia Lauria, died Sunday at the age of 113 in the village where she was born, news agency ANSA reported.

Lauria passed away in Pietrapertosa, in the southern Basilicata region of Italy, aged 113, three months and 24 days.

She returned several days ago to the village where she was born on March 4, 1896, and died early Sunday. Lauria is survived by two children, both aged over 80, one who used to spend part of the year with her and a second who has emigrated to the United States.

She was considered the oldest living person in continental Europe. Frenchwoman Eugenie Blanchard is actually several weeks older than Lauria, but lives in Guadeloupe, an overseas department of France in the Caribbean. The crown of oldest living person in Europe now passes to an Englishwoman, 113-year-old Florrie Baldwin, who was born on March 31, 1896, according to a ranking compiled by the Gerontology Research Group.
The oldest living person in the world is American Gertrude Baines, who is aged 115. [rc]

Source: The News International

ITALY: In 10 years, women will retire at the same age as men

. ROME, Italy / United Press International / June 26, 2009

Italian women may have the same retirement age as men within 10 years or so, an official said Thursday.

Civil Service Minister Renato Brunetta said a European Union directive banning gender discrimination was the final incentive to make the change, the Italian news agency ANSA reported.

Women can now start collecting pensions at 60 while men must wait until 65. Brunetta said the later retirement age would be phased in over a decade. The European Commission recently said Italy could face penalties if it did not take action within six months on the pension disparity. [rc]

© 2009 United Press International, Inc