She is the oldest in Cagliari, the second in Sardinia after Amelia Addari, 112 years old, and the fiftieth in Italy.
Luisetta Mercalli has crossed the extraordinary milestone of 109 years.
She was born on February 17, 1915, in Carloforte and survived unscathed between the two world wars and two pandemics, the Spanish flu and Covid.
Luisetta arrived in Cagliari at the age of 12 and a half in the Institute of the Carlo Felice Sisters to study and graduated very early at the age of 16 in the School of Method for Maternal Education, now the Pedagogical Institute.
You lived through the experience of the bombings of Carloforte on 4 April 1943, with 13 dead and many injured: you provided assistance, even following the wounded in hospital in Iglesias.
But Luisetta also had to deal with the tragedy of pandemics, from one millennium to the next: she overcame the terrible Spanish flu at 3 years old and also survived Covid unscathed.
A true pioneer for that period, she began teaching at a very young age at just 17 years old, because, as she says with a smile, "she was forced" by the principal to accept a 15-day substitution, right in Carloforte, as a teacher at the Professional Training School, and since then she has stopped until the age of 62, with 46 years of service: but in a small detail, in 1938 she had to go to Padua to obtain the specific title at the Professional Magisterium for Women and to Rome to take the State exam.
"I got married at 36, to Luigi Quaquero, without the c", she is keen to point out.
Surrounded by her daughters Angela and Myriam, with her granddaughters Alice, Elena and Francesca, she blew out her 109 candles by receiving a plaque with a medal and a tricolor sash from the municipality of Cagliari.
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