7 Tips That Might Help You Live to 100+
My husband is quite the genealogist. He’s always following hints on Ancestry.com, scrolling through old, imaged documents, and updating his Italian family tree. We even traveled to Italy a few years ago to walk the same narrow streets his grandparents did at the beginning of the 20th century.
Recently, a distant relative from Cranston, RI, contacted him through Ancestry.com, after DNA results revealed they are related. This started a dialogue between Jim, his mother, and his aunt about the Cranston relatives, in particular, Mary Civita Picano Ruggieri, a cousin, who lived to be 106 years old.
Jim’s aunt gave him copies of several newspaper articles about the long-lived cousin, and one morning, over coffee, he read highlights to me. Mary Civita Picano Ruggieri was 105 years old at the time she was interviewed by The Providence Journal. I was so inspired by her practical advice on how to live a long life, that I distilled them into the seven points below:
- “Live a clean life: no smoking, no drinking, and eat good food.”
- “The food is the most important thing. You eat good food, you’ll have good health.”
- “They eat a lot of junk today—all fried foods. We didn’t do that in our day. We ate all good, cooked food—no chemicals in our food, like today.”
- “I believe in fruit and vegetables, a lot of vegetables.”
- “Work hard; you’ve got to work if you want to live good. If not, you’ll be a bum. So you work, you’ve got money and you have a good life. Work does not kill anybody.”
- “You do not have to exercise in the morning like we do here [in the senior facility]: you work hard; that’s plenty of exercise. I went up and down three flights of stairs every day—who knows how many times a day I did it. It didn’t kill me.”
- “Sleep well.”
These down-to-earth words came from a woman who competed on a bowling league until she was 103 years old. Like Mary, we can all benefit from a lifestyle that includes a generous amount of physical activity and a diet consisting of plenty of fruits and vegetables.
Mary Civita Picano Ruggieri, who passed away in January of 2012, marked almost a century in the United States. She, and her family, left a little town called, Itri, just south of Rome, in April of 1912. Itri is one of the places we visited when we were in Italy. There’s a tiny park in Itri that is dedicated to Cranston, RI, the first home for many folks from that town, when they came to the United States. There’s a similar memorial in Cranston for the Itri immigrants.
This summer, we will travel to Cranston, RI, to attend an Italian festival, poke through gravesites, and explore the same streets that Jim’s ancestors walked so many years ago. We also hope to meet some of the relatives that still live there today.
It’s fun to tag along with Jim on his adventures through family history. I keep asking when we can go back to Italy. . .
Ann Silverthorn writes about a wide variety of topics in numerous genres. She recently completed a biography of William E. Dimorier (1871-1951), a poet and educator, who dedicated his life to service and leadership. Several new projects are underway.
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