Six people died and dozens more were hospitalized for smoke inhalation after a fire broke out overnight in a retirement home in Milan, the authorities said Friday, adding that the toll could have been far higher.
The fire started around 1:20 a.m. in a room on the first floor of the Casa dei Coniugi retirement home in a southern residential neighborhood of Milan. A Milan prosecutor, Tiziana Siciliano, said the fire had originated from a bed, “but what triggered it is impossible to say at present.” Specialized teams were already working to determine the cause, she said.
Speaking in front of the home early Friday, Mayor Giuseppe Sala of Milan said the fire had been contained to one room of the structure, where two people were killed by the flames.
The fire was quickly brought under control, but four other people who were in a room next door died from smoke inhalation, the mayor said. “It is a heavy toll,” he said in a televised interview. “It could have been much worse.”
Gianluca Chiodini, who supervises major crisis situations for the emergency service agency in the Lombardy region that includes Milan, said his team arrived at the scene of the blaze to assist firefighters. They were evacuating dozens of people from the structure after getting the fire under control. Milan city officials said there were at least 165 people in the building at the time of the blaze.
According to its website, the Casa dei Coniugi residence can accommodate guests with different levels of self-sufficiency. Mr. Chiodini said some residents were able to walk out on their own, but others, including those with Alzheimer’s, required assistance, and his team had to carry several people out.
“People were very scared,” he said in a telephone interview.
At least 80 people were taken to the hospital, with two in serious condition, 14 with serious but non-life threatening injuries and around 65 with light injuries, Mr. Chiodini said.
It was clear that some of the other residents had inhaled smoke, he said: “Their faces were black, their pajamas were black, their sheets and beds were black.”
Others showed no obvious signs of smoke inhalation, but they were taken to the hospital for blood tests “as a precautionary measure,” he said. Later Friday, firefighters determined that the entire structure had to be temporarily abandoned and that all the residents, even those in a wing that had not been touched by the fire, were relocated.
After Japan, Italy has the oldest population in the world, and a report issued Friday by the national statistics agency ISTAT, showed that it is getting older, with the average age increasing to 46.4 years from 45.7 years between early 2020 and 2023. As of this year, nearly a quarter of Italy’s population — 14,177,000 of 58,851,000 residents — was over 65 years of age, according to the report. The report also noted that the increasingly older population and diminishing working-age population “poses major challenges to the sustainability” of how Italy operates.
Though there are nursing homes in Italy, most Italians prefer to keep their older family members at home, still some end up in retirement communities.
Ivan Pedretti, the secretary general of Spi CGIL, one of Italy’s unions of retired persons, said that in Italy, the quality of care in retirement homes fluctuated. “We have first-rate nursing homes, and others that are problematic,” with those often making headlines for mistreating people in their care. “There remains much to do in a country with a rapidly aging population,” he said.
There are around 210,000 beds in retirement structures scattered throughout Italy, according to Virginio Marchesi, the president of the Milanese branch of a national association of nonprofit social assistance structures and services. The number is considerably lower than that of most other European countries, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Generally standards are high. In particular, in Lombardy, the region where Milan is based, “fire safety regulations are stringent,” he said. Alarms are installed in every room and are expected to be constantly maintained, he said.
The Casa dei Coniugi belongs to the city of Milan but is run by a private company that operates retirement homes in different regions.
Health Minister Orazio Schillaci on Friday joined a chorus of lawmakers who expressed condolences to the families of the victims and the residents of the home, calling the fire a tragedy “that leaves us dismayed and deeply saddened,” he said in a note.
