ITALY: When investigating magistrate Mr Emanuele de Maria was asked by a reporter to describe the corpse of 16-month-old Eleonora, his answer was eloquent: "What I saw was a bag of little bones, a little cadaver that reminded me of those awful photos of children who grew up in the Auschwitz concentration camp."
Last week, Bari-based magistrate Mr de Maria ordered the arrest of Eleonora's parents, Mr Amando Morisco (43) and Ms Francesca Scannicchio (23), suspected of the murder of their little daughter. Rushed to Bari's San Paolo hospital last Friday, the child died in the ambulance on the way.
A subsequent autopsy revealed that the child had starved to death, having gone without food for fully two months. The death of little Eleonora, daughter of a prostitute mother and a father whose only livelihood is that of illegal car park "attendant", represents a grisly story of everyday poverty and ignorance in today's Italy, a country where, according to the official statistics body, ISTAT, 10 per cent of the population lives below the poverty line.
Mr Morisco and Ms Scannicchio lived in a grimy converted garage on the ground floor of a council housing condominium in the dormitory town of Enziteto, 10 kilometres north of Bari, southern Italy. Here, they had just one bed in which, it seems, the entire family, minus Eleonora, slept. They got by thanks to a small social allowance from the Bari municipal authority, backed up by his "car park" work and by her irregular work as a prostitute.
Even though the couple was known to the municipal authorities and even though social workers had twice called to their illegal garage home, no one appears to have been able to intervene to save little Eleonora. For reasons best known to themselves, the couple appear to have decided to let the child starve to death, whilst at the same time looking after Ms Scannichio's three other children (aged four, two and four months).
The fact that Eleonora was the fruit of a relationship with one of Ms Scannichio's ex-clients with whom she went to live for six months may have sealed the child's fate.