Drafted in 2019, updated on 30 September 2025
Nino Castelnuovo, Pippo Baudo and Raffaella Carrà on the covers of Esselunga magazines in the 1960s.
This article is dedicated to my eldest son, Tommaso Caprotti, and to all the people I worked with at Esselunga.
It was written before my father died.
The first Esselunga supermarket opened when I was not yet born, on 27 November 1957
N.B.: The ‘Esselunga’ as we understand it today, does not yet exist:
the company is called Supermarkets Italiani and was founded on 13 April of the same year with a share capital of 1 million lire subscribed 51% by Ibec(Nelson Rockefeller), 18% by the brothers Bernardo and Guido Caprotti (*), 16.5% by Mario and Vittorio Crespi (Corriere della Sera), 10.3% by Marco Brunelli, 3% by Princess Laetitia Boncompagni and 1.2% by Franco Bertolini, financial adviser to the Crespi family.
Source: ‘Buying American Style. Le origini della grande distribuzione italiana 1945- 1971″ by Emanuela Scarpelini. Ed. Il Mulino 2001.
(*) with his brother Claudio Caprotti (who was a minor at the time but gave his consent and then the money to finance the purchase of the company from the Americans).
For the birth of the brand with the long esse see Caprotti Brand Campaign 1957 – 1959 – Second episode
Two flyers for the opening of the third supermarket, located in Via Bergamo in Milan, in 1958.
From “La spesa è uguale per tutti” by Emanuela Scarpellini. Ed. Gli specchi Marsilio, 2007.
In 1959 there were 27 supermarkets in Italy!…
Technique and design of the Supermarket in Italy, Roberto Denti, 1959.
The openings of these new retail spaces are an event:
customers and onlookers sometimes come from dozens of kilometres.
This can be seen in this photo of the opening of the Esselunga supermarket in Via Milanesi in Florence, on 9 February 1961
The supermarket in Viale Regina Giovanna (photo below) – today it would be called a superette as its surface area reaches 400 square metres. – is the reference point for my childhood shopping, in which Esselunga is already well established.
In fact this is how I wrote about my father, in a school essay, in 1968, when I was seven years old:
“my dad’s name is Bernardo…”
“…works all day, gets up at six; he is a grocer but sells everything”
The shelves and customers at Esselunga back then …
These are the years of supermarket packaged goods ads with the “long esse”…
aiming to replace fresh produce, made weekly, by housewives.
From a 2002 Esselunga brochure for the ESD Italy purchasing centre
These items were unobtainable in Italy and American managers (such as Richard W. Boogart, quoted above in the article on Regina Giovanna), who ran the company until 1965, decided to produce them ‘in house’.
It can safely be said that they constituted the first embryo of the private label in Italy.
Over the years, the company used fancy brands such as Nutron, Briciola, Maggiolino, Kekasa, Naturama, etc.
A 1967 advertisement by Jacovitti
Esselunga immediately understands that the needs and desires of the various local communities (*) that have immigrated to Milan must be met: the Sicilians, the Tuscans, the Campani, the Apulians…
(*) each area has its own ethnic group: Garbagnate the Campani, Cologno Monzese the Calabrians, etc.
The successive Esselunga campaigns – region by region, selling food and non-food products – are part of my indelible memories as a child.
The regional campaigns came to an end in the 1980s(I would resume, in a different way, localism in the 1990s).
All these campaigns are overseen by Ragionier Aldo Ferraro
Aldo Ferraro on the left in the photo with Giuseppe Caprotti, in Bologna in 1998
Going back to the 1960s and 1970s, the products were tried at home because Bernardo Caprotti came to eat with us – my sister Violetta and I – at noon every day:
there is still no canteen in the company and on the street, in Milan, there is no traffic!
Esselunga serves the needs of local communities but also has many international products in its range such as plumcakes, Hero jams or French cassoulet
The ‘thousand long lira’ campaign is also a great childhood memory.
The campaign was used from 1969 to 1971 and, not surprisingly, has products in the background of the poster that give the feeling of freshness, which was to become a strong point of the company.
And it was in this campaign, curated by Alberto Gandin, that the name esse lunga was born.
The slogan was ‘come and spend 1000 lire long at the supermarket with the esse lunga’.
From then on, customers began to call the supermarkets‘Esselunga’ , which became the name of the operating company while the holding company continued to be called Supermarkets Italiani.
Source: Claudio Caprotti – pictured below – younger brother of Bernardo Caprottiand Guido Caprotti.
Claudio Caprotti was
- financier, with the two brothers and his grandmother Marianne Maire Caprotti, ofthe purchase of majority shares in Supermarkets Italiani – later Esselunga – in the 1960s and 1970s .
- manager of the Florence office until 1972
- partner, from 1957 to the early 1980s, of Esselunga.
- learned his trade at A&P in Philadelphia and Colonial Stores in Atlanta, Georgia
The relatively quiet period of the 1960s was followed by the much more stormy era of the 1970s with the robberies of the Cavallero and Vallanzasca gangs…
Supermarket managers call my father at night for robberies:
it starts in Via Forze Armate…
Pictured, right, is Mr Remollino, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at work ( within Marketing), at Esselunga.
And we continue on Viale Papiniano
is shot in Garbagnate…
… a safe is stolen in Milan
viale Monza is being shot at again…
in Quarto Oggiaro the first of two Esselunga robberies by the Vallanzasca gang took place.
In the photo, centre, Mr Enrico Sgarella, whom I had the pleasure of meeting later at work in Esselunga
shooting again in Viale Vigliani…
… 3 gun-wielding bandits are arrested in Pezzotti Street …
while Vallanzasca’s second robbery took place in Via Monterosa and was called the Valentine’s Day robbery because it was carried out on 14 February
Vallanzasca, in ‘L’ultima fuga’ (The Last Escape), calls it :
“a Piedigrotta party. It was raining bullets everywhere, an inferno”.
(the episode is also found in “Le Ossa dei Caprotti” on page 98).
A few days later, on 29 February 1972, the whole gang was arrested:
Renato Vallanzasca’s brother Roberto committed the imprudence of buying a Porsche immediately after the robbery …
The handsome René was 22 years old at the time.
His partner, Consuelo Ripalta Pioggia, only 17!
The gangsters of the era also gave rise to cinema with the “poliziottesco” strand
The depiction of hooded bandits in ‘Milano Violenta’ is not left to chance:
the members of the Vallanzasca gang, in the Viale Monterosa robbery, have their faces covered by balaclavas …
But this is not only the era of banditry….
It is also that of political violence that Esselunga endures with an endless series of strikes and proletarian expropriations
Left-wing extremist Marco Barbone is one of the protagonists of these ‘expropriations’ (and of my book Le Ossa dei Caprotti, page 98), where people often enter a supermarket, shoot into the air to frighten the staff and then steal valuable goods.
Probably at this time some robberies were used to finance the Red Brigades (BR) or other organisations dedicated to armed struggle
One of the fond memories of the 1970s is visiting the Limito warehouse with my father and our dog
In 1978 they began working with the Armando Testa agency , which from now on took care of the group’s image
In 1986 I started working at Esselunga.
The company, thanks to the foresight and tenacity of Bernardo Caprotti and the attachment to their work of the majority of employees, is winning the battle against the unions.
Below is a case of attempted extortion that, unfortunately, will not remain isolated.
Ferdinando Viesti, a CGIL delegate, receives the 12 million, but when the money is handed over, he finds not only Esselunga officials but also the carabinieri. He manages to evade capture but the banknotes are marked and he is arrested.
The era of kidnappings (when I was in Milan, at the Leone XIII, there was an attempted kidnapping against me) and of the R.B. is fortunately over but the strikes continue:
in 1987, with Mr Luigi Guaitamacchi, the historic meat and kindred purchasing manager (pictured with me, below),
were among the few to enter Esselunga, in Limito di Pioltello, during a strike with a picket line and red flags.
A case ensues with the unions and the whole affair ends up on Radio Popolare.
In the early 1990s, in Florence, they were the subject of an ‘ad hoc’ strike:
in via De Amicis, the workers, seeing that ‘the boss’s son’ had entered the supermarket, went on strike and abandoned their jobs.
In another strike, in front of via di Novoli, again in Florence, I was physically assaulted.
However, these are the last ‘regurgitations’ of an era – that of extreme violence – that seems (*) to be coming to an end:
in 1989 the first superstore was opened and Esselunga is now entering another dimension which is that of the expansion of assortments and areas, new services and the enhancement of quality.
(*) every now and then, in this country, the past resurfaces: I happened to be attacked by a leoncavallino no more than five years ago, when I still had a restaurant in Milan, in Viale Pasubio.
Read more:
From supermarkets to superstores1 to From supermarkets to superstores 5
…but also:
Esselunga and e-commerce, or Esselunga at home
Esselunga bio, the organic adventure
For contributions received in the Centrale Esd v. Esselunga v. Coca-Cola
For the origins of supermarkets in Italy and the atmosphere of those years I recommend Le Ossa dei Caprotti.
And that we are still talking about “the Giuseppe Caprotti years“ today makes me happy …
Andrea Meneghini also wrote Esselunga: the crisis years and the future.
Bernardo, Violetta and Giuseppe Caprotti in 2000.
All material is part of the Giuseppe Caprotti archive
With contributions from Guido Alberti, Eleonora Sàita and Roberta Liberale.
