The women who look after Europe’s parents

In a great many Italian homes, the person who knows the old man best is not his son or his daughter. It is the woman who sleeps in the room off the kitchen.

She knows which pills he takes on a Monday. She knows that he coughs at four in the morning and wants his coffee at half past six. She knows the name of his ship, his late wife’s birthday and the joke he tells the postman. She has looked after other old people before him, and when he dies she will pack her suitcase in an hour and look after someone else.

In Italy she is called a badante. In English, a live-in carer. In Romania, Moldova and Ukraine, where many of these women come from, she is simply someone’s mother, working abroad.

How many are there?

Italy is one of the oldest countries in Europe, and much of its care for the elderly happens not in care homes but in private houses, paid for by families.

According to the employers’ association DOMINA, Italy had 817,000 regular domestic workers in its latest count, employed by 902,000 households. Nearly nine in ten are women (88.9%), and more than two thirds (68.6%) are foreign nationals. The largest communities come from Romania, Ukraine, the Philippines and Peru.¹

Something changed in 2024. For the first time, according to Italy’s social security institute INPS, carers looking after people outnumbered domestic workers looking after houses: badanti made up 50.5% of all registered domestic workers, up from 42.7% in 2015.¹

And those are only the workers with contracts. Everyone in the sector agrees that a large share of care work is undeclared, paid in an envelope, with an agreement that can end with a week’s notice, or less.

A life in someone else’s house

Living in means exactly that. The carer’s room may be a converted pantry or the dead wife’s sewing room. Her working day has a timetable, but her nights do not: if the old man falls, coughs, wanders or calls out, she gets up. Her free time is usually a few hours on Thursday afternoon and Sunday, when Romanian, Ukrainian and Moldovan women meet in parks, churches and bus stations all over Italy to talk in their own language.

Many of them were teachers, nurses, accountants or engineers at home. Their work in Italy is skilled, intimate and exhausting, and much of it is invisible, even to the families who depend on it.

The “Italy syndrome”

In Romania, doctors have a name for what this life can do to a person. They call it sindromul Italia, the “Italy syndrome”: a form of depression marked by anxiety, apathy and exhaustion in women who have spent years caring for strangers abroad, isolated, often without the language at first, and far from their own families.

It is not an official diagnosis. The term is usually traced to two Ukrainian psychiatrists in 2005. But at the Socola psychiatric institute in Iași, in north-eastern Romania, one psychiatrist told Al Jazeera that roughly 5% of the patients he treats for depression each year fit the description.²

The children at home

The other side of this story is in Romanian villages and towns, in the houses the women send their money to.

Romania’s child protection authority counted 54,798 children at the end of 2024 with at least one parent working abroad. For 8,074 of them, both parents were abroad.³ Those are only the families registered with the authorities. Romanians have a painful phrase for these children: the white orphans, children whose parents are alive and loving and a thousand miles away.

Video calls help. Money helps: it pays for school, for a roof, for a grandmother’s medicine. But a mother who has been away for most of her son’s childhood often comes home to a teenager she has to get to know again.

Why we wrote a novel about it

Our novel Live-In is about one of these women. Ileana Rusu, a former mathematics teacher from Buzău, has looked after Captain Ettore Bellandi, a retired sea captain, for nine months in a village above the Ligurian sea. One Monday morning in February she finds him dead. By the evening his family has discovered that their mother’s pearls are missing.

It is a story about suspicion, but mostly it is about what people owe each other: the carer and the family, the son in Italy and the son in Romania, on paper and off it.