ROME, Jan 5: The world’s oldest man, 112-year-old Antonio Todde, who swore the secret of his longevity was a daily glass of red wine, died overnight on the Italian island of Sardinia, relatives said on Friday.

And in what can only be regarded as a bizarre twist of fate, Italy’s oldest woman, 110-year-old Maria Grazia Broccolo, died only hours later in a small town south of Rome.

Friends and relatives were left to reminisce as 222 years of combined Italian history passed away in less than a day.

Todde made it into the Guinness Book of Records when he turned 112 last year and wore his crown of “The Oldest Living Man on Earth” with pride and a sense of humour.

“He was lucid to the very end,” relative Mariolina Todde told Reuters. “He was always joking that he was going to live to 130. Whenever we had friends round everyone was made to drink to his health. Red wine, of course,” she said.

Todde’s life-promoting tipple was a glass of local red wine, made by his grandson on the same rocky hills around the Sardinian town of Nuoro where he worked as a shepherd.

Broccolo made the headlines two years ago she returned to school to take exams well into a her second century, side by side at the school desks with teenagers.

“She was a real symbol for Italy,” Paulo Graziano, mayor of her home town, said. “She was made of very special stuff.”

Todde, a former shepherd-boy, passed away quietly in his sleep after asking to go to bed early, relatives said. “His blood pressure fell and he left us without a murmur,” grandson Vanni Todde told Reuters.

He witnessed two world wars, a technological revolution and saw the world’s population quadruple but was unfazed by the passing of the years.

Born in a tiny mountain village on January 22, 1889, the same year work on the Eiffel Tower was completed and baby Adolf Hitler took his first breath, Todde scarcely left the village.—Reuters