ROME (AP) – From his newsstand at the bottom of two hilly streets in Rome, Armando Alviti distributes newspapers, magazines and good cheer to locals before dawn until after dusk almost every day for more than half a day. century.
“Hello, Armando”, his clients greet him as part of their daily routine. “Hello, amore (love)” calls him back. Alviti chuckled as he remembered how, when he was a little boy, newspaper vendors would throw the day’s stacks at his parents’ newsstand, put them in the empty baskets of their motorcycles, and drive him around.
Ever since he turned 18, Alviti has operated the newsstand seven days a week, with a woolen cap to protect him from the Italian capital’s winter moisture and a table fan to cool him during his hot summers. Therefore, a strong fight took place when the coronavirus arrived in Italy, and his two eldest sons insisted that Alviti, who is 71 years old and has diabetes, stay at home, while juggling his own. jobs to keep the kiosk open.
“They were afraid I would die. I know I love myself crazy “, said Alviti.
Throughout the pandemic, health authorities around the world stressed the need to protect people at highest risk for complications from COVID-19, a group whose infection and mortality data quickly revealed included elderly adults. With 23% of its population aged 65 and over, Italy has the second oldest population in the world, after Japan, with 28%.
The average age of death in Italy COVID-19 has risen to around 80 years, many of them people with previous medical conditions such as diabetes or heart disease. Some politicians have argued that limiting the time elders spend outside their homes to avoid blocking the general population, which is costly for the economy.
Among them was the governor of the coastal region of northwestern Italy, Liguria, where 28.5% of the population is 65 years or older. Governor Giovanni Toti, 52, backed such an age-specific strategy when a second wave of infections hit Italy in the autumn.
The elderly are “mostly retired, not indispensable to the productive effort” of the Italian economy, Toti said.
For the news seller in Rome, these were words of struggle. Alviti said that Toti’s remarks “disgusted me. They made me very angry. “
“Older people are the life of this country. I am the memory of this country, “he said. Older self-employed adults like him, especially, “can’t be kept under the jar,” he said.
The high number of pandemics on the elderly, especially those in nursing homes, could have served to strengthen age or prejudice against the segment of the population generally referred to as “the elderly”.
The label “old” means “40, 50 years of life being grouped into one category,” said Nancy Morrow-Howell, a professor of social work at the University of Washington in St. Louis. Louis, who specializes in gerontology. She mentioned that nowadays, 60-year-olds often take care of 90-year-old parents.
“Ageism is so accepted … it is not in doubt,” Morrow-Howell said in a telephone interview. One form it takes is “compassionate ageism,” Morrow-Howell said, the idea that we must protect older adults. We have to treat them like children. ”
Alviti’s family won the first round, keeping him out of work until May. His sons begged him to stay home again when the coronavirus returned in the fall.
He made a compromise. One of his sons opens the newsstand at 6 in the morning, and Alviti takes over two hours later, limiting his exposure to the public during the morning rush.
Fausto Alviti said that he is afraid for his father, “but I also realize that for him to stay at home, it would have been worse, psychologically. He has to be with people. ”
At the open-air food market in Rome’s Trullo district, 80-year-old product seller Domenico Zoccoli mocks the belief that people over retirement “do not produce (and) need to be protected”.
Before dawn on a recent rainy day, Zoccoli had turned his stall into a cheerful range of colors: cans of red and green cabbage, radicchio, purple carrots, beet tips with leaves and cauliflower in shades of white, purple and orange, all harvested from his farm, about 30 kilometers away.
“The elderly must do what they feel. If I can’t walk, then I can’t walk. If I feel like running, I run, “said Zoccoli. After packing at 1:30 p.m., he said he would work a few more hours in his field, skipping lunch.
Marco Trabucchi, a psychiatrist based in the city of Brescia in northern Italy, who specializes in the behavior of older adults, believes that the pandemic has led people to reconsider their attitude for the better.
“Little attention was paid to the individuality of the old. They were like an indistinct category, all equal, with all the same problems, all suffering “, said Trabucchi.
In Italy, with childcare centers, legions of elderly adults, a few decades after retirement, are effectively doubling as essential workers, caring for grandchildren.
According to Eurostat, the statistics office of the European Union, 35% of Italians over the age of 65 take care of grandchildren several times a week.
Felice Santini, 79, and his wife, Rita Cintio, 76, are such a couple. They take care of the two youngest of the four grandchildren several times a week.
“If we didn’t care about them, their parents wouldn’t be able to work,” Santini said. “We help them (a son and daughter-in-law) stay in the productive workforce.”
Santini still works alone, half a day as a mechanic at a car repair shop. Then, when he comes home, his hands are busy in the kitchen: filling homemade cannelloni with sausages, making meat sauce and baking orange-flavored Bundt cakes for his grandchildren.
Cintio finds it painful not to be able to hug and kiss his grandchildren. But she hugged 9-year-old Gaia Santini when the girl ran to her happily after her grandmother sailed the narrow streets of Rome to take her to school. Cintio will take Gaia home for a break before accompanying her to a skating lesson.
Worried about the second increase in COVID-19, the couple’s son, Cristiano Santini, said he tried to limit the frequency with which his parents track their children, but to no avail.
“They are afraid (of infection), but they are more afraid of not living much longer” because of their age and the loss of previous time with their grandchildren, he said.