Vitantonio Lovallo

Vitantonio Lovallo was born in a vineyard in the Avigliano countryside of Basilicata on 28 March 1914. Local tradition in his family held that the true birthday was 25 March, with the civil register delayed by the long journey into town over Monte Carmine.

He grew up in a rural world of sheep, mules and hillside farming. At sixteen he took work as a shepherd to support his family, beginning a working life that would stretch past his hundredth year.

In town he met the woman who became his wife while she was recovering from pleurisy. They married in 1936. Lucia was born in 1938. Their son Vincenzo, born in 1940, died within months from meningitis. Maria followed in 1946, and another son in 1952.

His wife lived to 98 and died of leukemia in 2015. By then Lovallo was already a local emblem of endurance, still known by the nickname Ziton.

Called up in the Second World War, he served in an artillery group. On 8 September 1943, while in Greece, German forces captured him. He was taken to an internment camp on Rhodes until 27 November 1943, then held at Stalag VIII-C near Sagan until liberation by Soviet troops on 8 May 1945.

Though he had only a third grade education, he could write and therefore handled letters for comrades. Forced labour included railway work, and he later recalled going six days without food. He reached home on 27 October 1945 and left wartime notebooks that his descendants still keep.

After the war he worked as a muleteer and returned to farming. Sheep, vines and cultivated fields defined his days. He never learned to drive or cared to ride a bicycle, relying instead on the mule skills of his youth.

He stayed physically active far longer than most men of his generation, still handling a hoe and pruning shears in his hundreds and keeping rabbits and chickens after heavier work ended.

Family and interviewers asked him for the secret of long life. He spoke of a healthy, low stress existence, a Mediterranean diet of legumes and local produce, a daily glass of his own wine, and little medication beyond aspirin and a few supplements.

He stopped regular countryside labour around age 106. The European Supercentenarian Organisation validated his age in May 2024, confirming him as Basilicata's first validated male supercentenarian.

After Michele Cicora died on 31 March 2024, Lovallo became Italy's oldest living man. In March 2026 he turned 112, only the third Italian man known to reach that age and the first since Giovanni Frau in 2002.

When Romanian supercentenarian Ilie Ciocan died on 27 May 2026, Lovallo became the oldest living man in Europe. LongeviQuest and Italian media tracked his standing among the world's oldest men until his own death.

In Sarnelli and Avigliano he was not an abstract record holder but a neighbour and storyteller. Mayor Giuseppe Mecca called him a living repository of community memory, praising his simplicity, strength and love of family and homeland.

Regional officials likewise framed his life as testimony to a generation that built Basilicata through hard rural work rather than as a mere curiosity of age.

Vitantonio Lovallo died in Avigliano on 15 September 2026 at the age of 112 years and 171 days. Italian and international longevity researchers reported the death the following day.

Funeral arrangements reported locally included a service at the church of San Vincenzo Ferrer in Sarnelli and burial at Lagopesole cemetery. Condolences came from municipal and regional leaders who had celebrated him in life.

Lovallo leaves the male longevity record for Basilicata, a validated place among Europe's last surviving men of 1914, and a wartime diary that ties personal endurance to twentieth century catastrophe.

For Italy he was briefly the face of extreme old age rooted in countryside habit rather than medical spectacle: Ziton, who worked the land into his second century and kept the memory of his hills.