Pandemic exposes vulnerability of Italy's 'new poor'

Milan: The Coronavirus pandemic did not produce Elena Simone's first budgetary rough patch.The 49-year-old single mother found herself out of the job market when the 2008 global financial crisis hit Italy and never fully got back in, but she created a patchwork of small jobs that provided for herself and the youngest of her three children.

That all changed with Italy's first COVID-19 lockdown in the spring.

With schools closed, so went Simone's cafeteria job. Her housecleaning gigs dried up, too. While others returned to work when the lockdown ended, Simone stayed frozen out.

"There was a period when I was only eating carrots," she recalled from her kitchen decorated with colourful plush characters shaped like vegetables.

For the first time in her life, Simone needed help putting food on the table. At a friend's urging, she enrolled for access to the food stores operated by Roman Catholic charity Caritas.

Her eligibility covers her through January, and she hopes to be off the charity rolls by then "to make room for people who need it even more".

The charity serving more than five million people in the Milan archdiocese, Caritas Ambrosiana, says the pandemic is revealing for the first time the depths of economic insecurity in Italy's northern Lombardy region, which generates 20 per cent of the country's gross domestic product.

Simone, who has two adult children and a 10-year-old son at home, is typical of Italy's new poor.

These are people who managed to get by after the 2008 financial crisis, staying off the radar of Italy's welfare system by relying on informal, gray-market jobs and the help of friends and family.

But between Italy's near-total spring lockdown, the introduction of a partial lockdown when the virus surged again in the fall and the continued toll the pandemic is taking on Italy's economy, the slim threads that allowed people to weave together employment have snapped.

Nowhere in Italy is this more evident than in Lombardy, where COVID-19 first exploded in Europe.

Italian agriculture lobby Coldiretti estimates that the virus has created 300,000 newly poor people, based on surveys of the dozens of charity groups operating in the region.

Caritas Ambrosiana provided help to 9,000 people during the spring lockdown, 20 per cent of whom reported that their financial situation had "drastically" worsened over the 10-week closure.

In October, nearly 700 families requested food aid for the first time.

Nationally, one-third of all people seeking help from Caritas during the pandemic are first-time recipients, and in a reversal of usual trends, most are Italians and not foreign residents.

More than 40 organisations provide food on a daily basis in Milan, Italy's financial capital.

One of the largest, Pane Quotidiano, serves some 3,500 meals a day.

Many of those in need once worked in restaurants and hotels, which have been particularly penalised by the Coronavirus restrictions, or as domestic help.

"It is even more widespread than we knew, especially for a rich city like Milan," Caritas Ambrosiana spokesman Francesco Chiavarini said.

"These precarious jobs were lost. And we don't know when or if they will be restored," Chiavarini said. Researchers at Milan's Bocconi University said in a working paper for the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development that blue-collar workers without college degrees paid the heaviest price for Italy's virus restrictions.