How many times have we all wondered looking at a mummy that what if it gets up and starts walking? The mere thought of this is disturbing enough. Now, imagine finding a sitting mummified body 2 years after death. More than two years after her death, Italian authorities discovered the mummified body of a 70-year-old woman sitting at a table. Thus, spurring calls for greater elder care in the country.
The authorities discovered Marinella Beretta’s mummified bones at her home in Prestino, near Lake Como in northern Italy, with no living relatives. The new owner, an anonymous Swiss man, informed the police after neighbors informed him that the garden’s trees were in bad shape.
During serious winds in Lombardy, police unearthed her remains. It’s ambiguous how her body came to be mummified. However, biological mummification can transpire in intense cold, aridity, or a lack of oxygen, though it’s odd.
Approximately 40% of Italians over the age of 75 live in solitary
According to Italian media sources, she had been missing for at least two and a half years. The neighbors hadn’t caught a glimpse of Beretta since September 2019. They speculated she had shifted off when the coronavirus outbreak entered northern Italy in 2020. The police found no indication of unpleasant play in the circumstance. Also, the committee was to encompass the expenses of her funeral and burial.
On the front cover of Corriere Della Sera, Italy’s most prominent newspaper, editorialist Massimo Gremellini wrote Beretta was “loneliness personified”.
“Many of us still have memories of the chaotic, branched families of peasant Italy. Instead, the modern family is reduced… People die alone. And we live alone, which is almost worse,” he said.
“The mystery of Marinella’s invisible life behind the closed gate of her cottage teaches us a terrible lesson,” the Messaggero daily said.
“The real sadness is not that the others did not notice her death. It is that they did not realize Marinella Beretta was alive.”
“What happened to Marinella Beretta in Como, the forgotten loneliness, hurts our consciences,” Family Minister Elena Bonetti said on Facebook. “We have a duty, as a community that wants to remain united, to remember her life… no one must be left alone.”
A 2018 investigation estimate from the National Statistical Institute, approximately 40% of Italians over the age of 75 live in solitary. When they are in need, a similar amount of people assert they have neither relatives nor buddies.
