Emma Morano will turn 117 this week. The supercentenarian was born in Civiasco, Italy in 1899 on Nov. 29. She is the last person alive born in the 1800s. The last known living person to have been born in the 19th century will celebrate her 117 birthday on Tuesday. Emma Morano earned the Guinness World Record as the world’s oldest living person when Susannah Mushatt Jones passed away in May.  A relative told The Daily Telegraph that Morano said, “My word, I’m as old as the hills.”
“I eat two eggs a day and that’s it. And cookies. But I do not eat much because I have no teeth,” Morano said last month at her home in Verbania, a town in northern Italy on Lake Maggiore. Morano began eating eggs at age 20, when she was diagnosed with anemia. Her doctor advised her to eat three eggs a day, one cook and two raw. She continued the diet for nearly a century, which adds up to more than 1,000 per year, or 98,550 eggs.

Morano was born Nov. 29, 1899, in northern Italy. She is the last known living person to have been born in the 1800s. Morano lived through multiple wars and worked in a factory. Morano said she was a beautiful singer in her younger days. Morano left her husband, who she said was violent, shortly after the death of their only child. She never remarried.

Morano is almost completely deaf and her sight is limited, but she is otherwise in good health. She consumes raw eggs daily along with small amounts of meat and pasta but drinks only milk for dinner. Last year, Morano told the Italian newspaper La Stampa that she enjoyed a glass of homemade brandy each day. She goes to bed before 7 p.m. and rises before 6 a.m. A caregiver and relatives help care for her.
On a marble-topped chest of drawers stands proudly the Guinness World Records certificate declaring her to be the oldest person alive. The eldest of eight children who has outlived all her younger siblings, Morano knows that people are curious about her. Longevity could be in Morano’s genes – her mother lived to 91, and five of her sisters lived past 90, according to Italy magazine. Morano is the oldest of eight children. She also had three brothers.
But she’s not sure she will eat some birthday cake during the celebration on Tuesday, saying “the last time I ate a little, but then I did not feel good”. She clung to her independence, only taking on a full-time carer last year, though she has not left her small two-room apartment for 20 years, and has been bed-bound for the last year.

Among the plans surrounding the birthday, she is expected to receive some relatives and journalists as well as Verbania mayor Silvia Marchionini. And in the town at the local theatre there will be a performance of music over three centuries in Morano’s honour and also a preview of a romanticised biography called The Woman Who Saw Three Centuries.

Tags: 117th BirthdayEmma MoranoInteresting NewsitalyLast Person Born in 19th century

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