The death of a 70-year-old woman, whose body was discovered mummified in a chair more than two years after his death, he moved this week to Italy, rekindering the debate on the loneliness of the elderly.

Marinella Beretta, who did not have close relatives, was found on Friday at his house of Prestino, near Lake Como, in Lombardy (northern Italy).

The neighbors did not see it for at least two and a half years, according to the local press.

The mummified remains of the elderly were discovered by the police, who went to the place after being alerted about the danger of falling trees in his garden.

“What happened to Marinella Beretta in Como, loneliness, forgetting, hurts our consciences,” he reacted on Monday on Facebook the minister for the family, Elena Bonetti.

“A community that wants to be united, has the duty to remember life. We must stop limiting our horizons to the private sphere and re-tending the ties that unite us (…) No one should stay alone,” he wrote.

In Italy, almost 40% of people over 75 live alone, according to a report from the National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) of 2018.

That same percentage of people has no relatives, nor friends to turn in case of need.

“Marinella Beretta was the” incarnation of loneliness “, the columnist Massimo Gramellini on Tuesday on the cover of the newspaper Il Corriere della Sera, the one with the greatest circulation in Italy.

“Many have still memories of the large families of rural Italy, now, the modern family has reduced (…) people die alone, and we live alone, which is almost worse.”

Beretta’s neighbors, who did not see it since September 2019, thought he had moved by the Covid-19 pandemic, which hit Italy at the beginning of 2020. The police found nothing in the house that could suggest a suspicious death
.
The Prestino Mayor is going to pay the costs of the burial.

“Marinella’s mysterious invisible life behind the closed gate of her house, leaves us a terrible lesson. The great sadness is not that they did not realize his death, he did not realize he was alive,” said the newspaper
Romano Il Messaggero.