For more than three decades, Paolo Romano and Donata De Falco made their own house in Salerno a home for children in difficulty. Beginning in 1992, the couple opened their family life to minors in foster care, an experience they summarized with the words: children enrich us.
Their story was recounted by Il Mattino Salerno, which reports that their family home, called “Tamburo di Latta”, hosted 40 foster children over 34 years.
A house that became a family home
In 1992, Paolo Romano and Donata De Falco transformed their home into a family open to welcoming minors in difficulty. The house took the name “Tamburo di Latta”.
According to the verified sources, the children arrived through the social services or by order of the juvenile court for temporary foster care. They lived with the couple and with Luca and Martina, the couple’s own son and daughter, who grew up together with the foster children.
Il Mattino gives the figure of 40 children welcomed over the course of 34 years. That precise total is reported only by Il Mattino; other local and national sources confirm that many children were welcomed but do not give a total. Details on the length of individual foster placements and on the present administrative organization of the home are not available in the sources consulted.
Beyond the home: volunteering and inclusion
The family experience was closely connected with wider work in volunteering, social inclusion and support for vulnerable people in Salerno.
Paolo Romano and Donata De Falco are described in Salerno sources as a point of reference for social hospitality in the city. For decades, the couple helped build a network of welcome and solidarity for people in fragile circumstances, with foster care at home forming the starting point rather than the whole of that commitment.
That longer path continued through social initiatives rooted in Salerno, in particular L’Ipotenusa and the Villaggio di Esteban. The sources present these initiatives as a continuation of the same approach to welcome first developed inside the family home.
A library dedicated to Donata De Falco
The memory of Donata De Falco is carried on in Salerno by the social library “Volta la carta”, inaugurated in Via Mauri.
The library was created in collaboration with the association L’Ipotenusa and the Villaggio di Esteban and is dedicated to Donata De Falco. According to the local press account of the opening, it offers activities open to the neighbourhood and the surrounding area.
What remains documented, therefore, is both a private choice and a public legacy: a house opened in 1992, children welcomed alongside Luca and Martina, and social projects in Salerno that grew out of that family decision.
