Rotary evening

Giuseppe Caprotti: ‘My story and the story of Esselunga are in this book’

Giuseppe Caprotti guest of the Rotary Club Monza Brianza. The guest presented his latest book, Le Ossa dei Caprotti.

“With a strategic vision and a constant commitment to excellence Giuseppe Caprotti has contributed to the innovation and growth of a brand that represents a model of quality and reliability: Esselunga. His experience in the United States while still very young allowed him to return to Italy with a vision and information that was new and revolutionary compared to the standards of the time.” This is how Massimo Combi introduced Giuseppe Caprotti, the eldest son of Bernardo Caprotti, but who has not been with the company since 2004, after his father was fired. Perhaps because of his ideas or perhaps simply (in a manner of speaking simply ed.) because of the incompatibility of character with his father, his personal story, after years and years of work in the company, ended in 2004. And since Giuseppe did not want everything he had done to give birth and grow one of Italy’s most prestigious brands to be forgotten, but above all did not want false news to get the upper hand, casting a shadow over his name, he decided 20 years after leaving the company to write ‘Le Ossa dei Caprotti’. A book, whose cover is taken from a 1908 fabric from the former Manifattura Caprotti factory in Albiate, Brianza, which is also a historical-documentary project that lives on the Internet at this site and on social networks.

And so Giuseppe Caprotti, born in 1960, a graduate of the Sorbonne History Faculty in Paris, published Le Ossa dei Caprotti with Feltrinelli in 2023: between Garibaldi, the CIA and Esselunga, the story of the family that revolutionised the habits of Italians.

The Rotari Monza Brianza invited him on Tuesday evening, 26 November, to the Sporting Club, where among other things many had already seen his father, to talk about the book but also, without filters and with great emotion, the story of his family and what it has represented and still represents in the world of Italian entrepreneurship, his personal experience within the company, his dismissal but also his adolescence marked by moments of tension, the attempted kidnapping and the controversial relationship with an austere father but above all one who never recognised his great achievements. Not only that, Giuseppe makes it clear that Esselunga could have been much bigger if only other strategic choices had been made, which he had repeatedly suggested but which his father had never shared. “We were like two tracks of a train, two parallels that never meet,” – Caprotti declared.

Today, however, Giuseppe Caprotti is also the president of the Guido Venosta Foundation, his maternal grandfather. The foundation was established with the aim of spreading the highest ideals of culture and solidarity and is actually involved in four areas: health protection and scientific research, solidarity, promotion of culture, and environmental protection.

When Giuseppe Caprotti presents this book, however, he does so not only to reaffirm his value towards an affair that has been, in his opinion, ungenerous to him from the point of view of recognition and affection, but he probably does so knowing that there are entrepreneurs in the room, to make it clear that the family relationships present in the company must be a value and not an obstacle to business development. After all, Giuseppe Caprotti, a history graduate, would have liked to be a teacher..