Giorgio Angelozzi once kept bright-eyed Roman teenagers entranced, telling them tales of the adventures of Ulysses and enticing them to chat up the girls with lines from Virgil and Horace.
But retirement finally came, his daughter moved abroad and his wife, the love of his life, died. ”Il Professore” found himself alone, high up in the hills east of Rome, with only his books and seven cats for company. Now he is the most famous pensioner in Italy. Angelozzi disturbed the conscience of a nation with an advert he placed in a newspaper offering â,¬500 (about R3 900) to any family willing to adopt him as a grandfather. His act changed his life.
”There were some days when I did not say a word,” he said. ”Sometimes I found myself calling for my dear wife, Lucia, as if she was just through in the kitchen. But she died in 1992.”
The neat, bearded, bespectacled former philosophy teacher had little in common with his fellow villagers and rarely ventured out for long. His great excursion each month was to fill a taxi with crates of cat food at a supermarket in nearby Tivoli.
Angelozzi kept himself busy reading and talking to his cats and his one real friend and neighbour, the curator of the village museum. Every now and then, the chief of the local carabinieri popped in to check he was all right.
But each day life was getting harder.
”My eyes have got worse and my hands tremble. I have to use a magnifying glass to read the newspaper or a book and I cannot hold it still any more.”
The rare times the phone rang his heart leapt in the hope of it being Loredana, his 53-year-old daughter, an aid worker who last called from Kabul at Easter.
Finally, he decided he would be better off in an old people’s home, but discovered that his â,¬1 400 pension would not allow him the luxury. Hence the advert. Since it appeared in August, he has been deluged with letters and the phone has not stopped. Scores of would-be adopters and sympathisers have contacted him from as far away as New Zealand, Canada, Colombia and Britain.
”I was in a sentimental and intellectual desert,” he said. ”I thought that this way I would feel some much-needed drops of rain. There’s been a flood.”
In Italy, a millionaire has offered a life of luxury in his seaside villa, complete with servants. Antonello Venditti, a former pupil turned pop singer, has offered to take him in. And several elderly women leading equally lonely lives have been calling ”breakfast, noon and night”.
But one voice has touched Angelozzi more than all the others.
”When I hear it,” he said, closing his eyes, ”I feel like a cat having its head stroked. I want to ask her to repeat all the days of the week and count to 100 so I can listen.”
That voice, of a mother in northern Italy, has answered Angelozzi’s dream. He is preparing to pack up what is left of his old life and start a new one. He hopes to make himself useful teaching classical languages to the couple’s teenage son.
Italy has the world’s oldest population and because of social and economic changes, millions of over-65s in a country once famed for its strong family-based culture are alone without any assistance. Independent research agency Eurispes estimates that over-65s will increase from more than 10-million now, roughly one in five Italians, to almost 15-million in 2026. By 2051, 18-million will be pensioners.
”Solitude is the biggest problem for the elderly who are not dying of hunger,” said Carlo Fatuzzo, Italy’s first and so far Europe’s only member of a ”pensioners’ party” to have won a seat in the European Parliament.
”Until now, pensioners’ problems have always been the last priority for governments. But pensioners are beginning to take the power that strength in numbers gives them. It is time to realise that being old doesn’t mean you are defunct.” — Guardian Unlimited Â