Mamma Mia, we have a new grandfather

'Elderly retired schoolteacher seeks family willing to adopt grandfather. Will pay". When 80-year-old Giorgio Angelozzi placed this ad in Italy's national daily Corriere Della Sera last month, he hardly imagined that his plight would see him become a front-page story, interviewed by CNN and the subject of chat shows. More importantly, he could not have been certain that within a month he would have found himself a new family and new home, writes Paddy Agnew in Rome

Angelozzi's story reflects changing times. For many Italians, accustomed to a tight-knit family unit with up to four generations living under the same roof, it was shocking to discover an old man begging for company and human warmth. For many, it was hard to believe the loneliness that drove Giorgio Angelozzi to place his unusual ad.

A classics teacher at the Giulio Cesare liceo (high school) in Rome for 35 years, Angelozzi's retirement was brutally interrupted 12 years ago by the death of his wife, Lucia. Five years after that, on the advice of his daughter Loredana, he moved out of the capital to the little hillside town of San Polo dei Cavalieri, east of Rome. Loredana had argued he would be better off far from the smog, chaos and traffic of modern Rome. For Angelozzi, however, the idyll of life in a rural village eventually turned into a nightmare of loneliness and almost total solitude.

A voracious reader, he had increasing difficulty with books, given both his failing eyesight and his trembling hands: "I've lived the last seven years of my life in solitude in this village. Loneliness weighs heavily. I don't blame the village, rather I blame my Jesuit education. For me, conversation has to be lively and intelligent. I couldn't be like a lot of other pensioners who can sit on a park bench, talking about football," Angelozzi told reporters.

With 53-year-old Loredana far away, working for Medecins San Frontières in Afghanistan, he opted for radical action. He placed his famous advert, not really knowing what sort of response it would elicit.

Offers poured in from all over Italy and from Brazil, Britain, New Zealand and the US. You might have expected an old man to have been perplexed by such a wide range of choice. In the end, the selection process was not complicated. He chose to go and live with the Riva family from Spirano, near Bergamo, in northern Italy.

Why? "Right from the first moment that I spoke with Signora Riva, I was dumbfounded by her voice - it reminded me of my late wife. It sounds the same, it has the same cadence," he explained. The Riva family had been watching television one night when Angelozzi had featured in a news bulletin. Almost immediately, the Rivas - mother Marlena, father Elio, 18-year-old son Mateusch and 16-year-old daughter Dagmara - contacted him. "Mamma spoke to him. I don't even know what they said. I only know that after 10 minutes, he was already convinced that he would be coming to live with us," says Mateusch.

Last month, Angelozzi packed his bags, entrusted his seven cats to a neighbour and, accompanied by Marlena, moved north. He has moved in with the family, promising to contribute €500 a month to the household and hoping a trial period will work out.

Angelozzi's story highlights a problem in a country where more than 3 million pensioners live alone. He has no doubts about his decision, saying: "There is no equal for the happiness that a family can give you. I'm not going to them as a social experiment, I'm going there for the rest of my days."