Oliviero Toscani, illness and the thought of death in the last interview

“I have an incurable disease, I don’t know how long I have left to live.” This is what Oliviero Toscani expressed himself last August 28th, after having lost 40 kilos in a year. The photographer, who died today at the age of 82, was ill with amyloidosis and was hospitalized in Cecina hospital after his condition worsened.

Precisely in an interview with ‘Il Corriere della Sera’ Toscani had revealed how his life had changed after the serious illness, amyloidosis, which affected him starting in 2023: “At the end of last June I woke up with swollen legs, I was in Val d’Orcia. I started having difficulty walking. At the hospital they diagnosed me with a heart problem. At the end of August I went to Pisa to Santa Chiara and from there to Cisanello, where we had decided on the date of the heart operation, around September 20. My friend Francesco Merlo came to visit me with his cousin, a cardiologist at Giovanni XXIII in Bergamo: an incredible doctor. He made me go up to them for other tests and they immediately called Dr. Michele Emdin in Pisa, who specialized in the disease they thought I had: amyloidosis.”

In the same interview, Toscani had confessed that he was not afraid of death: “As long as it doesn’t hurt. And then I’ve lived too much and too well, I’m very spoiled. I’ve never had a master, a salary, I’ve always been free.”

In the interview Toscani had described the debilitating nature of the disease and its impact on daily life: “Proteins deposit on certain vital points and block the body and you die. There is no cure. In a year I lost 40 kilos, I can’t even drink wine anymore: the flavor is altered by medicines.”

“We don’t know” how long we have left to live, Toscani continued in the interview, “of course I’m not interested in living like this. I need to call my friend Cappato, I’ve known him since he was a boy. Every now and then I feel like it. I said it once before and he asked me if I’m stupid.” “It makes me laugh: the beauty is that I had never thought of finding myself in this situation, it is a new situation that must be faced. The beauty is that you are no longer interested in country, family and property, the ruin of man.”