World's oldest man reaches 112

An Italian shepherd listed by Guinness World Records as the world's oldest man has celebrated his 112th birthday by downing a glass of red wine.

Along with the wine, Todde enjoyed a birthday cake decorated with candles shaped like the number 112.

Italian TV showed a lively, rosy-cheeked man in a jaunty, old-fashioned cap surrounded by his family.

Among them was a 97-year-old sister and two daughters, aged 80 and 77.

"Just love your brother and drink a good glass of red wine every day," Antonio Todde was quoted as saying on the Guinness website. "You take one day after the other, you just go on."

On Sunday, Agriculture Minister Alfonso Pecoraro Scanio paid him a visit.

Born in 1889 in a tiny mountain village in the heart of Sardinia, Todde has been a shepherd all his life. He left his native island just once, to serve in the military in the First World War.

Todde inherited the Guinness title of oldest living man in December when American Benjamin Harrison Holcomb died in Carnegie, Oklahoma, at 111.

According to Guinness, the oldest certified person is a 115-year-old woman: Eva Morris of the United Kingdom, who was born on November 18, 1885.