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ROME (AP) – From his newsstand at the bottom of two hilly streets of Rome, Armando Alviti distributes newspapers, magazines and good humor to locals from before dawn until almost nightfall. every day for over half a century.
“Ciao, Armando”, his customers greet him as part of their daily routine. “Ciao, amore (love)” he recalls. Alviti chuckled as he remembered how, when he was a young boy, newspaper delivery men dropped off daily piles at his parents’ newsstand, sat him in empty baskets on their motorcycles, and took him for a ride.
Since he was 18, Alviti has operated the newsstand seven days a week, wearing a wool tweed cap to protect him from the winter humidity of the Italian capital and a table fan to cool him down during its scorching summers. A fierce battle therefore ensued when the coronavirus reached Italy and her two adult sons insisted that Alviti, 71, and diabetic, stay at home while they took turns juggling to keep the open kiosk.
“They were afraid I would die. I know they love me crazy, ”Alviti said.
Throughout the pandemic, health authorities around the world have stressed the need to protect those most at risk from complications from COVID-19, a group whose infection and mortality data quickly revealed it included older adults. With 23% of its population aged 65 or over, Italy has the second oldest population in the world, after Japan, at 28%.
The average age of COVID-19 deaths in Italy has hovered around 80, many of them with health conditions such as diabetes or heart disease. Some politicians have advocated limiting the time seniors spend outside their homes to avoid lockdowns of the general population that were costly to the economy.
Among them was the governor of Italy’s northwestern coastal region, Liguria, where 28.5 percent of the population is aged 65 or over. Governor Giovanni Toti, 52, pleaded for such an age-based strategy when a second wave of infections hit Italy in the fall.
Older people are “mostly retired, not indispensable to the productive effort” of the Italian economy, Toti said.
For the newspaper seller in Rome, these were words of struggle. Alviti said Toti’s remarks “made me feel disgusted. They made me very angry.
“The elderly are the life of this country. They are the memory of this country ”, he declared. Independent elderly people like him in particular “cannot be kept under a bell,” he said.
The pandemic’s heavy toll on the elderly, particularly in nursing homes, could have served to reinforce ageism or prejudice against the segment of the population generally referred to as “elderly”.
The label “old” means “40, 50 years of life being lumped into one category,” said Nancy Morrow-Howell, professor of social work at Washington University in St. Louis who specializes in gerontology. She noted that these days people in their 60s are often caring for parents in their 60s.
“Ageism is so accepted … it’s not being questioned,” Morrow-Howell said in a telephone interview. One form this takes is “compassionate ageism,” said Morrow-Howell, the idea that “we need to protect the elderly. We have to treat them like children. ”
Alviti’s family won the first round, preventing him from working until May. His sons implored him to stay home when the coronavirus rebounded in the fall.
He found a compromise. One of his sons opens the kiosk at 6 a.m. and Alviti takes over two hours later, limiting his exposure to the public during the morning rush hour.
Fausto Alviti said he was afraid for his father, “but I also realize for him to stay at home, it would have been worse, psychologically. He needs to be with people.
In the open-air food market in Rome’s Trullo district, produce seller Domenico Zoccoli, 80, also scoffs at the belief that people over retirement age “don’t produce (and) need to be protected.” “.
Before dawn on a recent rainy day, Zoccoli had transformed his stall into a range of cheerful colors: cans of red and green cabbage, radicchio, purple carrots, beetroot tops and cauliflower in shades of white, purple and orange, all harvested. from his farm about 30 kilometers (18.6 miles).
“Older people have to do what they feel. If they can’t walk, they don’t. If I feel like running, I run, ”Zoccoli said. After packing his bags at 1:30 p.m., he said he would work several 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 the elderly, believes the pandemic has caused people to reconsider their attitudes for the better.
“Little attention has been paid to the individuality of the elderly. They were like an indistinct category, all equal, with all the same problems, all suffering, ”said Trabucchi.
In Italy, with chronically scarce child care, legions of older adults, decades after retirement, are effectively doubling as essential workers caring for their grandchildren.
According to Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union, 35% of Italians over 65 take care of their 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 their four grandchildren several times a week.
“If we don’t care about them, their parents couldn’t work,” Santini said. “We help them (a son and a daughter-in-law) to stay in the productive workforce.”
Santini still works himself, half a day as a mechanic in an auto repair shop. Then, when he gets home, his hands are busy in the kitchen: stuffing homemade cannelloni with sausages, making meat sauce and baking orange 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 happily ran to her after her grandmother walked the narrow streets of Rome to pick her up from school. Cintio will bring Gaia home for a break, before accompanying her to an ice skating lesson.
Worried about the second wave of COVID-19, the couple’s son Cristiano Santini said he tried to limit how often his parents watched children, but to no avail.
“They are afraid (of the infection), but they are more afraid of not living longer” because of their age and the lack of time spent with their grandchildren, he said.
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