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116-Year-Old Italian Emma Morano May Be the Last Living Person Born in the 1800s | ASHARQ AL-AWSAT English Archive 2005 -2017
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In this Friday, June 26, 2015 photo, Emma Morano, 116, smiles at her physician, Carlo Bava, as she sits in her apartment in Verbania, Italy.


Today Emma Morano is the oldest person alive, after the world lost 116-year-old Susannah Mushatt Jones on Thursday. Morano is also believed to be the last surviving person who was born in the 1800s, born on Nov. 29, 1899, 4+ months after Jones.

She received the news Friday, which upon hearing she said: “My word, I’m as old as the hills”.

She literally is the oldest living person in the world, and the only one left who has touched three centuries. Emma eats raw eggs, is a brandy-drinking single Italian woman, who says she owes her long life to her early bedtime and daily eggs.

Emma, born in the Piedmont region of northern Italy, lives now in a small lakeside town near the Switzerland border, still in her own one-bedroom home.

Noting that doctors say her health is very good for someone her age, as a teenager, she was told to eat raw eggs for her anemia, and so she has every day since, according to a New York Times profile in 2015, in addition to her daily plates of minced meat and pasta.

On a side note, her physician, Carlo Bava, said Morano’s longevity is “a phenomenon.”

In regard of her long life, she also says that abandoning an unhappy marriage has helped her live so long, she told the Times. She and her husband got separated in 1938 and never remarried. “I didn’t want to be dominated by anyone,” she said, though she did have many “suitors.” She worked at a factory and then as a cook, and didn’t retire until she was 75 – 41 years ago.

Reporters went to her home in Verbania on Friday to talk to her about being the last living person with a birth date in the 19th century. But, according to the Associated Press, they had to wait because Morano was napping.