ROME (AP) – From his kiosk at the bottom of two hilly streets in Rome, Armando Alviti has been giving newspapers, magazines and good cheer to the locals almost every day from pre-dawn to dusk for over half a century.
“Ciao, Armando,” his customers greet him as part of their daily routine. “Ciao, amore (love)” he calls back. Alviti chuckled as he remembered how newspaper deliverers, when he was a little boy, delivered the stacks of the day to his parents’ newsstand, left him in the empty baskets of their motorcycles, and took him for a ride.
Since the age of 18, Alviti has operated the kiosk seven days a week, wearing a woolen tweed cap to protect it from the winter damp of the Italian capital and a tabletop fan to keep it cool during the scorching summers. A mighty battle therefore ensued when the coronavirus reached Italy and his two adult sons insisted that Alviti, who is 71 and has diabetes, stay at home while they took turns juggling their own jobs to keep the newsstand open.
‘They were afraid I was going to die. I know they love me crazy, ”said Alviti.
During the pandemic, health authorities around the world stressed the need to protect the people most at risk of complications from COVID-19, a group whose infection and death data was quickly revealed, including the elderly. With 23% of the population aged 65 or older, Italy has the second oldest population in the world, after Japan, at 28%.
The mean age of COVID-19 deaths in Italy hovers around 80, many of them people with previous medical conditions such as diabetes or heart disease. Some politicians have argued in favor of limiting the time older people spend outside the home to avoid locking up the general population, which is costly to the economy.
Among them was the governor of Italy’s northwestern coastal region, Liguria, where 28.5 percent of the population is 65 or older. Gov. Giovanni Toti, who is 52, advocated such an age-specific strategy when a second wave of infections hit Italy in the fall.
Older people are “for the most part retired, not indispensable to the productive effort” of the Italian economy, Toti said.
Those were fighting words for the news vendor in Rome. Alviti said Toti’s comments “disgusted me. They made me very angry. “
“The elderly are the life of this country. They are the memory of this country, ”he said. Independent older adults like him, in particular, “cannot be kept under a bell jar,” he said.
The severe toll of the pandemic on the elderly, particularly those in nursing homes, could have served to reinforce age discrimination or prejudice against the segment of the population commonly referred to as ‘elderly’.
The label “old” means “40, 50 years of life thrown together in one category,” said Nancy Morrow-Howell, a professor of social work at Washington University in St. Louis who specializes in gerontology. She noted that today people in their 60s often look after parents in their 90s.
“Ageism is so accepted … it is not questioned,” Morrow-Howell said in a telephone interview. One form it takes is “compassionate ageism,” said Morrow-Howell, the idea that “we must protect older adults. We must treat them like children.”
Alviti’s family won the first round and kept him away from work until May. His sons begged him to stay home again when the coronavirus recovered in the fall.
He compromised. One of his sons opens the kiosk at 6am and Alviti takes over two hours later, preventing him from being exposed to the public during the morning rush hour.
Fausto Alviti said he is afraid of his father, “but I also realize that if he stayed at home it would have been psychologically worse. He must be with people. ”
At the open-air food market in Rome’s Trullo neighborhood, 80-year-old producer Domenico Zoccoli also scoffs at the belief that people who have passed retirement age “should not produce (and) be protected.”
Before dawn on a recent rainy day, Zoccoli had transformed his stable into a cheerful array of colors: boxes of red and green cabbage, radicchio, purple carrots, beetroot and cauliflower in white, violet and orange, all harvested from his farm. about 30 kilometers (18.6 miles) away.
“Old people should do what they feel. If they can’t walk, they don’t walk. When I feel like running, I run, ”Zoccoli said. After packing his booth at 1:30 p.m., he said he would work in his field for several more hours and skip lunch.
Marco Trabucchi, a psychiatrist from the northern Italian city of Brescia who specializes in the behavior of older adults, thinks the pandemic has prompted people to rethink their attitudes for the better.
“Little attention was paid to the uniqueness of the old. They were like an unclear category, all equal, all having the same problems, all suffering, ”said Trabucchi.
In Italy, where childcare centers are chronically scarce, legions of older adults, several decades after retirement, actually double as essential workers by caring for their grandchildren.
According to Eurostat, the statistics office of the European Union, 35% of Italians over 65 take care of grandchildren several times a week.
Felice Santini, 79, and his wife, Rita Cintio, 76, are one such couple. They take care of the two youngest of their four grandchildren several times a week.
“If we couldn’t take care of them, their parents wouldn’t be able to work,” Santini said. “We help them (a son and daughter-in-law) to stay in the productive workforce.”
Santini still works himself, half a day as a mechanic at an auto repair shop. Then when he gets home, his hands are busy in the kitchen: stuffing homemade cannelloni with sausage, making meat sauce, and baking orange-flavored Bundt cakes for his grandchildren.
Cintio finds it painful not being able to hug and kiss her grandchildren. But she hugged 9-year-old Gaia Santini as the girl joyfully ran towards her after her grandmother walked the narrow streets of Rome to pick her up from school. Cintio takes Gaia home for a break before accompanying her to a skating lesson.
Concerned about the second wave of COVID-19, the couple’s son, Cristiano Santini, said he was trying to limit the frequency with which his parents look at the children, but to little avail.
“They are afraid (of infection), but they are more afraid of not living much longer” because of their age and missing previous time with their grandchildren, he said.