Emma Morano RIP : Aged 117 , the last human alive born in the 1800's

OBITUARY

Emma Morano

The final link to the 1800s who credited her longevity to a daily diet of positive thinking and eggs — one of them raw

Morano at 116 with her picture at age 43. She lived in three centuries and saw eleven popes

At 117, Emma Morano was not only the oldest person in the world but also the last person to have lived in the 1800s. Born in November 1899, when Queen Victoria was on the throne in Britain, her life spanned three centuries: from the era of steam to that of the internet.

As she became famous in recent years — she was appointed the Italian equivalent of dame in 2011 — her tips on longevity were avidly sought. Only four people are known to have lived longer, all of them women, headed by Jeanne Calment, the Frenchwoman who died in 1997 aged 122. No man has lived beyond 116.

Morano put her good health down to positive thinking and to her diet. “For breakfast I eat biscuits with milk or water,” she told reporters. “Then during the day I eat two eggs — one raw and one cooked — just like the doctor recommended when I was 20 years old.” She would eat only the yolk, with a niece entrusted to procure them fresh every day from a farmer. “For lunch, I’ll eat pasta and minced meat, then for dinner, I’ll have just a glass of milk.” She had pureed banana before bedtime.

At 115, though unable to leave her home, she still lived independently, able to cook for herself and to do household chores. By then, however, she had not left the two rooms of her apartment, which had no bathroom, for 25 years. The last time had been when she was 90, to have lunch with a cousin. Yet it was only last year that she agreed to have a live-in carer.

The eldest of three boys and five girls, Emma Martina Luigia Morano was the daughter of Giovanni Morano, a labourer from Civiasco, sited to the west of Lake Maggiore, in Piedmont, northeast Italy. She came of a long-lived line. Her mother, Matilde Bresciani, who was Swiss, and all four of her sisters reached 90; one, Angela, died at 102 in 2011.

At the time of her birth Italy had been a unified nation for less than 30 years. It was ruled by Umberto I, though in the Vatican Pope Leo XIII still refused to treat with the new state. Italy was largely agrarian, yet there were signs of modernity: Fiat had been founded five months before Emma was born and Guglielmo Marconi had recently transmitted a wireless message across the Channel.

At 18 months old in 1901

In Britain that November, people were celebrating the news of the end of the war against the Mahdi in Sudan, which had cost the life of General Gordon. To the consternation of the government of Lord Salisbury, however, Ladysmith and Mafeking in South Africa were now being besieged by the Boers. As Emma’s mother was in labour, a meeting was being held in Spain to set up FC Barcelona. With ten vehicles sold every week, Karl Benz was the world’s largest manufacturer of motor cars.

When Emma was a girl the family moved north to Villadossola, 75 miles northeast of Turin, in search of work. They lived behind a steelworks and she recalled that she was a great favourite with the local boys. She loved to go out dancing, often with her sisters. “When I came back home late, my mother would beat me on the legs,” she remembered. She had a fine voice and claimed that passers-by would stop to hear her singing traditional ditties.

She started work at 13, spinning jute into sacking, but the damp climate made her ill. A doctor predicted that she would not live long. Accordingly, the Moranos moved to Pallanza, by Lake Maggiore, northwest of Milan. There she lived for the rest of her life, continuing in the same line of work as before until she reached pensionable age in 1954. She was 16 when her boyfriend Augusto Barilati, who was five years older, was called up to serve in the First World War. He never returned. Morano continued to believe for the rest of her life that he had been killed in the conflict, although recently assiduous journalists have established that he survived the war but afterwards went to live in Milan.

In 1926, when she was 27 and Mussolini was already in power, she instead married Giovanni Martinuzzi, the son of a neighbour. But they were not happy together. “He would hit me, every day, after he came back from work,” she said. Their only child, Angelo, born in 1937, died when he was six months old. The next year, Morano threw her husband out of the house. “I called my brothers while he was at work and got them to take his things away,” she said. The pair separated but divorce remained illegal in Italy for much of her life and they remained formally married until his death in 1978.

Although she once saw the sea at Genoa, her world remained confined to a small corner of Italy even as it endured another war and then witnessed extraordinary change in the decades that followed. She never travelled abroad or even visited Rome. After leaving the jute factory she continued to work as a cook in a boarding school in Pallanza, helping the nuns there to clean the vegetables, until she was 75.

Recently she had been bedbound and rather deaf. Otherwise she was in good health. Her doctor visited her once a month. In winter she always refused his offer to inoculate her against influenza. He did on one occasion discover that she had an ulcer on her leg, caused by lying on her house keys so that no one could take them from her.

She had given up watching television, and although a devout Catholic — she would take Communion at home once a month — the name of Pope Francis meant little to her. She had seen 11 popes come and go over the decades. Instead, she spent much of the day in her favourite chair, sometimes looking at the three clocks that she kept in each room. “Now and then I have a sweet,” she confessed, “just to pass the time.”

Emma Morano, supercentenarian, was born on November 29, 1899. She died on April 15, 2017, aged 117