Being required to stay in separate rooms by social services was the final straw for an Italian couple with no work, writes PADDY AGNEW
SITTING AT the kitchen table, complete with large clock on the wall, they look like an ordinary couple. Both of them are in their 60s and both are respectably dressed people – he is wearing a shirt, tie and charcoal grey jacket while she is in a woollen polo-neck sweater, and wears de rigeur ear rings.
The point about 64-year-old Salvatore De Salvo and his 69-year-old wife Antonia Azzolini is that, on appearances at least, you would never guess.
You would never guess that last Sunday in Bari, on Italy’s southeast coast, they would both take their own lives.
Their desperation had been prompted by Salvatore’s inability to find work after being laid off in 2004, even though he had been on an intense job search that saw him not only make more than 600 job applications but also contact government ministers, deputies and various local authorities.
Salvatore’s efforts to find himself a job inevitably aroused media curiosity, which in turn led to a TV station in Bari to screen an interview that has been much watched this week on Italian YouTube.
While I say that “on appearances” you would never guess that these pair intended to take their lives: if you listen to the interview, however, it soon becomes apparent that they already had tried and failed (in 2007).
Salvatore had worked as a travelling salesman for a textile firm, one of the many such European companies that have struggled in the face of competition from Chinese-made imports. That, at least in part, explains how he lost his job. The problem is that he never found another one.
The couple’s economic difficulties saw them evicted from their home and they were forced to rely on Bari social services who offered them accommodation in a sort of old people’s home where they were forced to live in separate rooms.
“For the last 45 years, we’ve always lived together through good and bad times, but this would mean falling out of the frying pan and into the fire. At this point, death would be better,” the pair wrote this summer in a letter to Daniela Santanchè, cabinet under-secretary to then prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.
In their desperation, the couple had written to Ms Santanchè in the hope that she might be able to do something on their behalf, perhaps even arouse Mr Berlusconi’s best charitable sentiments.
After all, for much of the last two years, when asked about his involvement with Moroccan call girl Kharima “Ruby” El Mahroug, Mr Berlusconi had replied that he often “helps people in difficulty”.
One of Ms Santanchè’s assistants actually got in contact with the De Salvos but little came of the phone call.
In an email sent on July 1st last year, the couple made it clear that they were not happy with the ministerial response, writing: “Why did you encourage two desperate people only to abandon them to their fate (there has been no reply to my email of June 16th). Perhaps the prime minister refused to intervene because when he says that he ‘always helps people in difficulty’, he is referring exclusively to friends and people who guarantee him either profit or pleasure.
“You will soon be reading in your papers of the dignity with which two Italian citizens can die, disgusted by the hypocrisy and cruelty of you politicians. We send our last greetings to the illustrious cavaliere Berlusconi.”
The email closes with the words, usually addressed by gladiators in ancient Rome to the emperor, “Ave Silvio, morituri te salutant” (Hail, Silvio, those who are about to die salute you).
This all might seem like some sort of cheap pomposity were it not for the fact that, six months later, the couple did indeed kill themselves.
They rented a room at the Sette Mari hotel on the Bari seafront, where they took a huge quantity of barbiturates.
The drugs killed Antonia immediately but not Salvatore, apparently, since his drowned body was found on the beachfront, close to the hotel.
In a recently released report, Suicide in Italy at a Time of Crisis, the research institute EURES points out that in the first year of the current global crisis, namely 2009, suicide in Italy increased by nearly 6 per cent to 2,986 cases. In the wake of the De Salvo case, all the signs are that those figures are not going to be much better in 2012.