‘Lonely woman’ found mummified 2 years after dying in her home
An Italian woman dubbed ‘loneliness personified’ was found mummified in a chair after dying two years ago.
Neighbours assumed she’d moved away during lockdown.
Police stumbled upon her remains when they made a house call during high winds in Lombardy, which risked uprooting neglected trees in her garden.
She had not been seen by neighbours for at least two and a half years, according to Italian media reports.
Beretta was ‘loneliness personified’, wrote editorialist Massimo Gramellini on the front page of the Corriere della Sera, Italy’s biggest selling daily.
“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.
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The neighbours, who had not seen Beretta since September 2019, assumed she had moved away at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, which hit northern Italy in 2020, the reports said.
“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,” she said.
Nearly 40 per cent of over 75-year-olds in Italy live alone, according to a 2018 report by the national statistics institute (ISTAT).
The same number also said they had neither relatives nor friends to turn to in case of need.
Police found nothing at the scene to suggest foul play and the council was expected to pay for her funeral and burial.
“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 realise Marinella Beretta was alive.”
It is unclear how she died but a medical examiner has revealed that she passed away ‘toward the end of 2019’, based on her ‘mummified’ remains.
On Tuesday the mayor of Como, Mario Landriscina, invited the city to Ms Beretta’s funeral, which is yet to have a date set, and said ‘the local government would take care of the funeral arrangements’.
He added, “I will try to be there and I invite the city to be present. This is the moment to be together, and even if this woman had no relatives, we could become her relatives.”
Proofreading by Gift Luckson, Editor at Neptune Prime.
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