‘ In our meeting, Brunelli explained to me that talking about the events at Esselunga still caused him a lot of pain, more than sixty years having passed since those events. After the break that later came with my family, it was as if he had locked those memories in a sealed room, which he no longer wanted to enter. He did not even want to hear Bernardo’s name mentioned: for him he was “the unnamed” and (…) he had never made himself available to talk about it with the countless interlocutors who, over time, had asked him to reconstruct those years” (p. 47).
‘I don’t know what relations were like between Bernardo and Marco Brunelli in the early years of their cohabitation as minority shareholders in Esselunga, in the shadow of the Americans. In a recent conversation with Benedetta, Uncle Guido’s daughter, my cousin told me that Brunelli had said that he had struggled to get along with my father from the start. What is certain is that the first disagreements began to manifest themselves blatantly in early 1960.
In the month of May, in fact, Brunelli and my uncle Guido founded a chain of supermarkets together that aimed at Rome, the city that IBEC’s men had discarded. (…)
Bernardo, despite the success of the operation, fell out with his brother and called him back to Milan. Uncle Guido could not even attend the inauguration of the first shop, despite being an equal partner with Brunelli. He suddenly stopped hearing from him, leaving his friend bewildered. A frost descended between Brunelli and my father, who had pushed his brother to break off relations: the two would never speak again and it was from that moment on that, for Guido’s best friend, Bernardo became ‘the unnamed’. (pp. 67 -69).
Note : the meeting with Marco Brunelli took place in 2019 at his home and the chain he founded was GS, later passed to Carrefour.
