ROME (AP) – From his newsstand at the end of two rough streets in Rome, Armando Alviti distributes newspapers, magazines and joy to residents from before dawn until after dusk almost every day for more than half a century.
“Ciao, Armando”, his customers greet him as part of their daily routine. “Ciao, amore (amor)”, he replies. Alviti chuckled as he remembered how, when he was a boy, newspaper deliverers left the batteries of the day at his parents’ newsstand, sat him in the empty baskets on their motorbikes and took him for a walk.
Since the age of 18, Alviti runs the newsstand seven days a week, with a wool tweed cap to protect him from the winter humidity of the Italian capital and a table fan to cool him in the hot summers. A powerful battle therefore took place when the coronavirus hit Italy and her two adult children insisted that Alviti, who is 71 and diabetic, stay at home while they took turns juggling to keep the newsstand open.
“They were afraid that I would die. I know they love me madly, ”said Alviti.
During the pandemic, health officials around the world emphasized the need to protect those most at risk from complications with 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 years, many of them people with previous medical conditions, such as diabetes or heart disease. Some politicians advocated limiting how much time the elderly spend outside their homes to avoid blocking the general population, which was costly for the economy.
Among them was the governor of the coastal region of Liguria, in northwest Italy, where 28.5% of the population is 65 years old or more. Governor Giovanni Toti, 52, defended this age-specific strategy when a second wave of infections hit Italy in the fall.
The elderly are “mostly in retirement, they are not indispensable for the productive effort” of the Italian economy, said Toti.
For the news vendor in Rome, those were words of struggle. Alviti said that 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. Older adults who are self-employed, like him, “cannot be kept under a glass bell jar,” he said.
The strong impact of the pandemic on the elderly, especially those in nursing homes, may have served to reinforce prejudice related to age or against the segment of the population commonly referred to as “elderly”.
The “old” label 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, specializing in gerontology. She noted that today people in their 60s tend to take care of their parents in their 90s.
“Age bias is so accepted … it is not questioned,” said Morrow-Howell in a telephone interview. One form it takes is “compassionate prejudice,” said Morrow-Howell, the idea that “we need to protect older adults. We need to treat them like children ”.
Alviti’s family won the first shift, taking him away from work until May. His children begged him to stay home again when the coronavirus recovered in the fall.
He reached an agreement. One of his sons opens the stand at 6 am and Alviti takes over two hours later, limiting his exposure to the public during the morning rush.
Fausto Alviti said he is afraid for his father, “but I also realize that for him to stay at home, it would have been worse psychologically. He needs to be with people. ”
At the outdoor food market in Rome’s Trullo neighborhood, fruit and vegetable seller Domenico Zoccoli, 80, also scoffs at the belief that people after retirement age “do not produce (and) must be protected”.
Before dawn on a recent rainy day, Zoccoli transformed his tent into a cheerful variety of colors: boxes of red and green cabbage, radicchio, purple carrots, beet leaves and cauliflower in shades of white, violet and orange, all harvested from his farm about 30 kilometers (18.6 miles) away.
“The elderly must do what they feel. If they can’t walk, they don’t walk. If I want to run, I run, ”said Zoccoli. After tidying up his tent at 1:30 pm, he said he would work several more hours in his field, skipping lunch.
Marco Trabucchi, a psychiatrist in the city of Brescia, in northern Italy, specializing in the behavior of the elderly, believes that the pandemic has led people to reconsider their attitudes for the better.
“Little attention was paid to the individuality of the elderly. They were like an indistinct category, all the same, with all the same problems, all suffering, ”said Trabucchi.
In Italy, with chronically scarce childcare facilities, legions of older adults, a few decades after retirement, effectively double as essential workers caring for their grandchildren.
According to Eurostat, the European Union’s statistics department, 35% of Italians over the age of 65 care for their grandchildren several times a week.
Felice Santini, 79, and his wife, Rita Cintio, 76, make such a couple. They take care of the two youngest of their four grandchildren several times a week.
“If we didn’t take care of them, their parents wouldn’t be able to work,” said Santini. “We are helping them (a son and daughter-in-law) to remain in the productive workforce.”
Santini still works alone, half a day as a mechanic in an auto repair shop. Then, when he gets home, his hands are kept 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 she hugged Gaia Santini, 9, when the girl ran happily towards her after her grandmother walked the narrow streets of Rome to pick her up from school. Cintio will take Gaia for a rest at home, before accompanying her to an ice skating class.
Concerned about the second wave of COVID-19, the couple’s son, Cristiano Santini, said he tried to limit the frequency with which parents take care of their children, but without success.
“They are afraid (of the infection), but they are more afraid of not living much longer” due to their age and lack of time with their grandchildren, he said.