This is a story of new migration known all over Europe, with a very special connotation in Italy. We are talking about the „badanti", ladies in the age between 30 and 50 working as full time care person who takes charge of an elderly person.

Olga and Maria from Ukraine came to Italy almost two years ago. First they went to Napoli (Naples), then to Milan. Maria takes care and lives in the house of an 82 year old woman, Olga in that of a 79 year old man. They are paid 700 Euro a month, but they work something like 16 hours a day, 6 days a week - that is about 100 hours a week - doing everything for almost disabled people. They both have no papers and are in Italy illegally, but they don´t care much.

"Badanti" are very requested in Italy, these days. Only in the area of Milan there work something like 130.000, in the whole of Italy probably 800.000, but nobody knows exactly, because 70% of them work illegally, have no permission to stay and to work. They are something like the grey army of old people's care helpers. Without them the care system in Italy would collapse.
In Italy they have grown into a special kind of symbyosis with the local situation, that´s why you can talk of a mass phenomena. Numbers say that in the Milan area 45% of non self-sufficient old people are taken care of by a badante. In Italy very often families don´t want to consign their old relatives to institutions for old people, because they are still attached to them ore because they simply do not have the money, or because their old people very often prefer staying in their own home. So the solution of finding to find a badante who takes care of the old father or mother often seems the best and the cheapest. You may well call it "low cost welfare - the Italian way".