The world’s oldest person, Emma Morano, has died at her home in northern Italy.

At the age of 117 her life spanned three centuries, having been born in the 1800s. Morano was also one of the five oldest people in recorded history.

Her doctor, Carlo Bava, said he had called her caretaker, only to be told that she had passed away on Saturday afternoon while sitting in an armchair at her home in Verbania on the shores of Lake Maggiore.

He said he had last visited Morano on Friday, and she had talked to him and held his hand as she normally did. He said: “She thanked me and held my hand.”

Morano’s extraordinarily long life began on 29 November 1899. She was one of eight children born to a couple in Civiasco in the Piedmont region of northern Italy. It was the same year in which Guglielmo Marconi first transmitted a radio signal across the Channel and four years before the Wright brothers first took to the skies. She lived through two world wars and more than 90 Italian governments.

Her last birthday was marked by a party and concert recounting her life – from her experiences during the first and second world wars to her work in a factory making jute sacks, and her decision to separate from an abusive husband at a time when such action was frowned upon.

She attributed her longevity to leaving her husband in 1938 shortly after the death of her only child at the age of seven months, and to the inclusion in her daily diet of two raw eggs and a little raw minced meat. When she was 20, her doctor had told her she was anaemic and that such a diet would improve her health.

Bava, her doctor for 27 years, said Morano rarely ate vegetables or fruit. “When I first met her she ate three eggs a day, two raw in the morning and then an omelette at noon, and chicken at dinner.”

Over the years she also worked as a cook in a boarding school until she retired at the age of 75, and remained single, although she never divorced her husband. In later life as her contemporaries died and both her sight and hearing deteriorated her social circle became more restricted. But last year Rosi Santoni, one of the relatives who helped look after her, said she had plenty of family to care for her and had many friends in the town.

Morano was officially recognised as the world’s oldest person after Susannah Mushatt Jones died in New York in May last year. She was not the only member of her family to live a long life. Her mother, an aunt and some of her siblings all made it into their 90s and one of her sisters, Angela Morano, died aged 102. Morano became the oldest living person in Italy and Europe after the death of Maria Redaelli in early 2013.

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