Como, the old woman found dead at home and other similar cases

No one had ever looked for her in the past two years. Marinella Beretta, 70, had been dead for two years: hers corpse was on a kitchen chair. There was no news of the woman, who lived alone, since September 2019: she had no relatives who called her, and not even the Swiss citizen – to whom she had sold the bare ownership of her house in Prestino, near Como, while maintaining the right to live there – he had been worried about not being able to contact her for months.

The body was discovered only when the intervened firefighters, called by neighbors to secure the trees of the garden, which have become unsafe after the strong gusts of wind of the last few days. The families who lived near her home, in fact, had hypothesized that the woman had moved due to the pandemic: they had found that her house had been uninhabited for a long time.

From the first rumors, it seems that Marinella Beretta died of natural causes, but it will be the autopsy to clarify the causes of death.

“What happened to Mrs. Marinella Beretta in Como, forgotten loneliness hurts consciences»Wrote the Minister for Equal Opportunities and the Family, Elena Bonetti. “Remembering their life is the duty of a community that wants to remain united. We need not to limit the horizons to the private sector and to go back to taking care of the bonds between us. Taking care of each other is the experience of families, institutions, of our being citizens: no one should be alone “.

According to a survey by the confederal unions of pensioners on a thousand elderly people between 65 and 85 who live in Lombardy, there are at least 100,000 over 80 who live in extreme solitude. 14% of the over eighty-year-olds are in genuine domestic “self-confinement”.

Stories of loneliness like that of Marinella Beretta are common and frequent. It happens in the North, as well as in the South. A few days ago, in Cava de ‘Tirreni, in the province of Salerno, a 63-year-old woman she was found dead in her home: she had died at least fifteen days earlier. Her body was discovered because, to set up a construction site, the municipal police tried to contact her so that she could move her parked car.

Just a week ago, in the Sant’Eusebio district, on the hills of Genoa, a 67-year-old man, who lived alone and was dependent on social services, died in the apartment that had been assigned to him. Disturbed by the smell of decay, the neighbors decided to seal the mail with masking tape. After the alarm of the social services, which could not reach the man, the city police and firefighters entered the apartment and found the body lying on a duvet: the man had been dead for a week.

And while in Sanremo there was the festival, a fifty-year-old was found dead in his home: the time of death was at least two months earlier. At the end of January, in Carmagnola, in the province of Turin, the body of a 69-year-old was discovered in his bedroom, in an advanced state of decomposition. The neighbors, alarmed by the smell coming from the apartment, contacted the police.

Other stories of Vanity Fair that may interest you:

The Christmas of the elderly alone, like Mary

“Away with the homeless from Como: they offend the decorum”

Source: Vanity Fair

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