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    "headline": "Seniors dancing to Michael Jackson in Rome’s Piazza Testaccio, with no tip jar, draw 491,000 likes",
    "description": "Retired dance teacher Pasquale Iannotta, 70, and his former pupil Elisa Fava, 79, turned down the video, won praise from Rome's mayor and now urge retirees off the sofa.",
    "datePublished": "2026-11-05T13:36:00+00:00",
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    "keywords": "dance, Instagram, Rome, Testaccio, Viral video",
    "articleBody": "A portable speaker, a Michael Jackson track and two dancers in their seventies moving in step: that was the whole show in Rome’s Piazza Testaccio at about 7 p.m. on August 6. Nobody passed a hat. Nobody set up a phone. When the man filming offered to send them his footage, they said no thanks. That footage, posted on Instagram by the Rome-based tour company The Tour Guy, now shows 491,000 likes, 9,800 comments and 19,900 shares, and it is circulating again this week, three months after it was shot. What the clip shows The caption written by the person behind the camera sets the scene. The pair danced for around 20 minutes to five or so songs, each routine a little different and each clearly rehearsed. Then they walked off in opposite directions. The poster said he had been coming to the square almost every day for two weeks and had never seen anything like it there. It is real, and it is not a stunt. The dancers are Pasquale Iannotta, 70, a retired dance teacher, and Elisa Fava, 79, who first met when she was a pupil in his class. Iannotta introduced himself in the comments under the post: “Ciao a tutti, sono Pasquale il signore del video,” he wrote, thanking everyone for their kind words. A week after the clip went up, the pair went back to the square to dance again and spoke to reporters there. Rome’s mayor, Roberto Gualtieri, joined the comment thread too, congratulating “questi due bravissimi ballerini” (these two excellent dancers) and adding that there was a lot of beauty in such a simple video. National television followed, with invitations to perform on morning shows. Why they do it The motive, by their own account, is simple: they both “hate sitting around at home.” Since then the two have turned an unexpected audience into a small campaign aimed at people their own age. “I have many friends who, unfortunately, when they retire, like many others end up sitting on the sofa watching television. I’d like to see them get a bit more active,” Iannotta said. Fava kept her message shorter: “Don’t be idle: if you can, move.” That lands in a country where it matters. Italy is the oldest nation in the European Union, with a median age of 49.1, according to the EU’s statistics agency. One neighbor wrote under the video that the duo are regulars, heading to a park near Testaccio for an hour or more once the warm season starts, and that they practice a lot. Another commenter compared the moves to step aerobics. Most of the thousands of replies are some version of thank you. The numbers, then and now When the pair first spoke to reporters on August 12, the post had a little under 370,000 likes. When we checked it on November 5, it showed 491,000. That is roughly 121,000 more likes, a rise of about a third (121,000 divided by 370,000 is 0.33), for a clip that is now 13 weeks old. The routine itself is short by comparison: 20 minutes split across five or so songs works out to about four minutes per dance. Where it happened Piazza Testaccio is the heart of Testaccio, the 20th rione, or historic district, of Rome. The neighborhood takes its name from Monte Testaccio, an artificial hill built from broken clay amphorae dumped there when the area handled much of the river trade along the Tiber. It grew in the late 19th century as a working-class district for the laborers of nearby industries, and the square held the local food market until 2012, when the market moved to Via Luigi Galvani. The person who filmed the clip described the piazza as one of the last places in Rome where children still play every evening and locals still gather. For one summer evening, it also had a dance floor. The duo’s plan is to keep going outdoors whenever Rome’s weather allows, and the clip’s count was still ticking up on November 5: 491,000 likes and counting. Further reading Wikipedia: Testaccio Image: Lalupa, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.",
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