Too old to get private work, too young to retire, too honest to commit crime, too dignified to seek charity. This is the limbo in which Enzo Spatuzzi, a sixty-year-old Neapolitan former self-employed worker, finds himself. He has been on hunger strike in front of the Campania Regional Government headquarters for days in protest. "I'm like the invisible man," he immediately attacks anyone who approaches asking for information. "At least I am to the State, which apparently thinks of everyone except those, like me, who tried to make it on their own and who now, after closing my tire repair shop due to bankruptcy, find themselves on the streets without any kind of social safety net." Enzo has three children and, he says, began working as a tire repairer when he was 15. "I've always worked since I was a child, but, as often happens, the people who kept me in the shop didn't pay all my contributions. A few years ago, I thought about taking the plunge and opening my own shop, but the good times didn't last long. The crisis," he tells Ansa bitterly, "has cut off my legs and my future, leaving me alone in the company of creditors." There's no shortage of people coming down from the high-rise buildings in Naples' business district to offer him a meal. "Everyone around here knows me now, and I appreciate these gestures of solidarity, but," he explains, "I didn't come here to ask for charity. I'd like to be listened to, to be 'taken to task,' as they say in Naples. Just this," he says, between anger and sadness, "just so I don't feel so useless." "I'm good at my job," he says proudly, "but the friends I've asked to hire me are embarrassed. They tell me they can't pay me the money I deserve for my skills, so they hire young, inexperienced people." Enzo Spatuzzi, 66, tire dealer. The invisible, too good to work.
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