QTableWidget::itemFromIndex is protected, why? and a workaround?

[mortoray]

I'm writing a delegate to do drawing for cells in a table. The delegate is provided the QModelIndex item and I would like to retrieve the QTableWidgetItem that is associated with it. The problem is that the itemFromIndex member of QTableWidget is protected.

In one case I have a derived table, but in my generic case I use just the standard QTableWidget. Without deriving the class is there another way to get at the QTableWidgetItem from the QModelIndex?

[Lykurg]

what's about using QTableWidget::item()?