'Mummified' body of Italian woman found at kitchen table

Neighbours believed the 70-year-old had moved away when the pandemic hit

Marinella Beretta’s body was discovered still sitting on a kitchen chair in her home in Prestino, near Lake Como in northern Italy. Alamy

The "mummified" remains of a 70-year-old woman have been found more than two years after she died.

Marinella Beretta’s body was discovered still sitting on a kitchen chair in her home in Prestino, near Lake Como in northern Italy.

Her body was discovered after storms threatened to bring down some neglected trees and a neighbour came to check for damage.

Police gained permission to enter the building and found the body in what they described as a "mummified" condition.

Beretta had no living relatives. It is thought she had been given permission to live at the property after selling it to a person in Switzerland who did not visit.

The case has prompted calls for better care for the elderly in Italy. She had not been seen by neighbours for at least two and a half years, Italian media reported. "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."

Nearly 40 per cent of over-75s in Italy live alone, said a 2018 report by the national statistics institute.

The same proportion said they had neither relatives nor friends to turn to in times of need. 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.

The neighbours, who had not seen Beretta since September 2019, assumed she had moved away at the start of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, the reports said. 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," Il Messaggero newspaper 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."