Meet Rome's 90-year-old 'chef of the poor'
The "chef of the poor" personally hands out the first cup, and shares a laugh with the homeless.
ROME (Reuters) - Every weekend at a colourful market in southern Rome, you’ll find 90-year-old Dino Impagliazzo (pronounced Impaleazzo) slowly wandering through the stalls, greeted cheerfully by vendors as they hand him crates of leftover fruit and vegetables.
For over a decade, Impagliazzo - known fondly as Rome’s "chef of the poor" - has spent his weekends collecting the waste food to cook up warm meals that he dishes out to the homeless living outside the Vatican colonnades.
Bags of near-expiring food and surplus produce are donated by local shops and bakeries who help him live out his pensioner passion - feeding the homeless.
Sprightly Impagliazzo drives the food to a fully equipped restaurant-sized kitchen, where he puts on his apron and traditional chef’s hat and gets to work.
Four days a week, some 300 volunteers join him at his ‘RomAmor’ (RomeLove) association to prepare between 800-1,000 meals of hot vegetable soup, sandwiches and desserts, that they personally hand to the homeless each evening.
"For about 15 years, together with many friends, we have been cooking for poor and homeless who live on the street," said Impagliazzo, stirring a large boiling pot of vegetables.
For Impagliazzo, who once worked for Italy’s social security department, it all began a few years into his retirement when a homeless man at a Rome train station asked him for money to buy a sandwich.
Sandwiches filled stomachs but did little to warm the homeless. So, together with his wife and friends, he began cooking meals at home, then a convent, then the professional kitchen.
"We started this adventure with ten sandwiches then we made 30, 40, 50…" he said, as volunteers around him chop potatoes and wrap ham rolls in clingfilm ready to serve.
His message? One of unity. "We try to involve more and more people so that Rome becomes a city where people could love each other, you know? Solidarity," he said.
There are around 7,700 homeless people living in the Italian capital, according to Catholic charity Caritas. The number congregating near the Vatican has grown visibly in recent years, especially at night when they cluster under arcades to sleep.
On Saturday nights, the smell of warm home-made soup sifts through Bernini’s columns that surround St. Peter’s Square, as homeless line up to be fed by Impagliazzo and his volunteers.
The "chef of the poor" personally hands out the first cup, and shares a laugh with the homeless who have become his friends.
Impagliazzo, who received a honorific from Italian President Sergio Mattarella recognising him as a "hero of our times," never dreamed his initiative would become successful to the point of having a surplus of volunteers.
On a recent evening near the Vatican, four extra volunteers showed up.
"They share the joy of helping people in need," he said, with St. Peter’s Basilica lit up behind him.
