Giancorrado Ulrich, always known as Dado (1937 – 2021), was the son of Guglielmo, one of the most quoted and desired interior architects of the Milanese upper middle class and beyond (he was a pupil of, among others, Piero Portaluppi, brother of my great-grandmother Adele).
With a great sense of irony, he was a lifelong friend, from his youth, of both my mother Giorgina and my uncle Claudio [Caprotti]: in one photo Dado appears with my equally youthful mother [Giorgina Venosta] at a costume ball at the Venosta home in 1954 [my mother was 14], in another in the 1970s, at Uncle Claudio’s wedding with Paola Albera, sister of Giuliana, my father Bernardo’s future second wife.
A very handsome boy, when we were staying in Forte dei Marmi, and he was a guest of his uncle, he was chased by a certain ‘Signora Trombetta’ (to whom he denied himself day and night!). He was very nice to us children and viscerally loved opera, so much so that, late in life, he wrote a book as intelligent and original as he was.
With Claudio it was a deep and intimate friendship: when he died, the loss was bitter, so much so that he wrote in his obituary ‘We had everything. But not happiness and fortune. My affection for eternity. Claudio.”.
Bibliography:
G.C. ULRICH, Il gioco dell’opera, Milan 2019.
ID., Giancorrado Ulrich, biography written by him for the publisher Brioschi.
G. CAPROTTI, Le Ossa dei Caprotti. Una storia italiana, Milan, 2024
Below: Uncle Claudio, the groom, in the centre, to his left in the photo Dado Ulrich, to the right Piero Castellini, my mother’s first cousin. Seen from the right are Dady Mazzucchelli, a great friend of my mother and Claudio himself, and at his side Piero Settembrini, also in white.
On the right: another picture of my mother, Giorgina Venosta, with her future sister-in-law Lu (Maria Luisa) Austoni, in Caprotti watching her at a dance at the Caprotti family home in 1954.
