ROME (AP) – From his kiosk at the bottom of two mountain streets in Rome, Armando Alviti distributes newspapers, magazines and good cheer to locals from dawn to dusk almost every day for more than half a century.
“Hello, Armando,” his clients greet him as part of his daily routine. “Hello, love (love),” he calls again. Alviti laughed as he remembered that when he was a little boy, newspaper deliverymen would leave the batteries of the day in his parents ’kiosk, sit him in the empty baskets of his motorcycles, and take him for a ride.
Since turning 18, Alviti has operated the kiosk seven days a week, wearing a wool tweed cap to protect it from the Italian capital’s winter humidity and a desktop fan to cool it off during the hot summers. So a powerful battle ensued when the coronavirus arrived in Italy and his two older children insisted that Alviti, who is 71 and diabetic, stay home while juggling his own jobs to keep the kiosk open.
“It simply came to our notice then. I know they love me crazy, ”said Alviti.
Throughout the pandemic, health authorities around the world have stressed the need to protect people most at risk for complications from COVID-19, a group that infection and mortality data quickly revealed included older 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 COVID-19 deaths in Italy is around 80, many of them people with previous medical conditions such as diabetes or heart disease. Some politicians advocated limiting the time elders spent away from home to avoid blockages of the general population that cost the economy.
Among them was the governor of the northwestern coastal region of Italy, Liguria, where 28.5 percent of the population is 65 or older. Governor Giovanni Toti, 52, championed this age-specific strategy when a second wave of infections fell in the fall.
Toti claimed that the elderly are “mostly retired, not indispensable to the productive effort” of the Italian economy.
For the Rome news seller, those were words of struggle. Alviti said Toti’s statements “displeased me. They made me very angry. “
“The elderly are the life of this country. They are the memory of this country, ”he said. Older adults working for themselves like him, above all, “can’t be kept under a bell jar,” he said.
The heavy weight of the pandemic for the elderly, particularly those in nursing homes, could have served to reinforce the age, or harm the segment of the population generally known as the ‘elderly’.
The label “old” means “40, 50 years of life grouped into one category,” said Nancy Morrow-Howell, a professor of social work at the University of Washington in St. Louis. Louis specializes in gerontology. He noted that currently 60-year-olds often care for 90-year-old parents.
“Ageism is so accepted … it’s not questioned,” Morrow-Howell said in a telephone interview. One of the ways it takes is “compassionate age,” Morrow-Howell said, the idea that “we need to protect older adults. We need to treat them like children.”
Alviti’s family won the first round, keeping him away from work until May. Her children begged her to stay home again when the coronavirus bounced back in the fall.
He got a compromise. One of his children opens the kiosk at 6 a.m. and Alviti takes control two hours later, limiting his exposure to the public during the morning rush.
Fausto Alviti said he is afraid of his father, “but I also realize that staying at home would have been worse, psychologically. He has to be with people. ”
In the open-air food market in Rome’s Trullo district, 80-year-old product seller Domenico Zoccoli also mocks the belief that people past retirement age “don’t produce (and) have to be protected “.
Before dawn on a recent rainy day, Zoccoli had transformed his stall into a cheerful range of colors: boxes of red and green cabbage, radicchio, purple carrots, leafy beet leaves, and cauliflower in shades of white, violet, and orange, all harvested. from his farm about 30 kilometers (18.6 miles) away.
“Older people have to do what they feel. If they can’t walk, they don’t walk. If I want to run, I run, ”said Zoccoli. After packing his stop at 1:30 p.m., he said he would work several more hours at his camp, skipping lunch.
Marco Trabucchi, a psychiatrist based in the city of Brescia, in northern Italy, who specializes in the behavior of older adults, believes the pandemic has gotten people to reconsider their attitudes for the better.
“Little attention was paid to the individuality of the old man. They were like an indistinct category, all the same, with all the same problems, all suffering, ”said Trabucchi.
In Italy, with few chronicles, legions of older adults, a few decades after retirement, effectively function as essential workers caring for their grandchildren.
According to Eurostat, the statistics office of the European Union, 35% of Italians over the age of 65 take care of their grandchildren several times a week.
Felice Santini, 79, and his wife, Rita Cintio, 76, are the couple. They take care of the two youngest of their 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 a daughter-in-law) stay in the productive workforce.”
Santini still works himself, half a day as a mechanic in a car repair shop. Then, when he gets home, his hands stay 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 to be able to hug and kiss his grandchildren. But he hugged nine-year-old Gaia Santini when the girl ran happily towards her after her grandmother sailed the narrow streets of Rome to pick her up at school. Cintio will take Gaia home for a break, before accompanying her to an ice skating lesson.
Concerned about the second wave of COVID-19, the couple’s son, Cristiano Santini, said he tried to limit the frequency with which his parents observe children, but it was of little use.
“They are afraid (of the infection), but they are more afraid of not living much longer” because of their age and lack of previous time with their grandchildren, he said.