This is the moment two elderly hunchback female beggars are suddenly “miraculously” cured and start beating each other up in a row over who is to keep cash from a tourist.
The video starts with the two elderly women hunchbacked women seemingly crippled with age and dressed in black leaning on walking sticks as they hold out their hands to the woman tourist.
Video Credit: CEN/@RiprendRoma
The footage was shot on the Via della Conciliazione, which is a street in the Italian capital Rome, which connects Saint Peter’s Square to the Castel Sant’Angelo on the western bank of the Tiber River.
The two old women are both clearly hoping to get the money that the woman tourist is handing out, and are facing each other barely moving until the tourist starts to move away.
However, as soon as the tourist steps to one side, they exchange words and then start fighting each other.
The video was posted online by the Riprendiamoci Roma Association which wrote: “MIRACLE! MIRACLE! MIRACLE!
“The hunchbacked beggars who can only walk with the aid of sticks can suddenly walk tall, and what vigour! What strength! What a circus!!!”
The posters then went on to argue that the tragedy of the situation is that there are people who are really sick while the charity that they might be entitled to is being taken by fakers like this.
Riprendiamoci Roma, which means ‘Revive Rome’ in Italian, claims to want to urge people in Rome to take pride in their city, and to encourage the public to take steps to make Rome great again. They wrote: “Our intent is to bring the campaign to stop the fall of Rome to the people and to get them out on the streets in protest.”
They added: “For years we have been denouncing this circus: because of people like this true invalids are forced to show their deformities to show they are not fake hunchbacks.”
The posting attracted widespread criticism because of the behaviour of the women, such as from ‘annamariasalva3’, who said: “How disgusting! What a sh*tty image for so many tourists! Romans are fed up with this!”
And ‘6SorAlex9’ said: “But whose fault is it? What about the institutions that do not watch? Of course, in part, the fault lies with the citizens and tourists who feed this mass by giving them money, stop giving money to such losers, if they do not make money their business will end.”
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Story By: Jana Tomovska, Sub-Editor: Joseph Golder, Agency: Central European News
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