My mother and almost all her closest friends worked at La Rinascente, the oldest and most famous department store in Milan: ‘rinascentine’, in short, as the employees of the ‘big R’ called themselves. They went in at a very young age, either as their first job after their studies or, like my mother Giorgina [Venosta], making a living after separating from her husband (in her case my father, Bernardo Caprotti).
They came out of it trained by a very effective school, because the ‘Rinascente’ was really a school (and by the way, it took courses, carefully training its staff in every field). Just read the House Organ, the company ‘newspapers’: the employees were in fact the ‘rinascentini’ who, in addition to having a great spirit of cohesion, were considered an excellence in the field of training resources, including women, who came to occupy positions of responsibility before many others, from the managers (the heads of the branches, to whom Natalia Aspesi – also a friend of her mother – dedicated an article in a ‘little magazine’) to the executives (Amneris Latis, who preceded Adriana Botti Monti as head of advertising, had already been running the sector since the mid-1950s).
Sources:
Rinascente Archives, Grafica e comunicazione visiva lR 1950-1970, logo designed by Max Huber, 1950[who also designed the Esselunga logo]
Ibid, House Organs, N. ASPESI, Un personaggio del nostro tempo: la donna gerente, in “Cronache”, 47/December 1968, pp. 8-13 [pdf format]
G. CAPROTTI, Le Ossa dei Caprotti. Una storia italiana, Milan, 2023
