[vc_column_textHISTORY A life experience
Caprotti re-enters an Esselunga and gets excited
“After more than 20 years I enter Esselunga with serenity, without shadows and bad thoughts, but there is something that, even today, always manages to surprise and excite me:
meeting former colleagues who recognise me, greet me with affection and sometimes ask me for a photo together”. Anyone who expresses himself in this way after crossing the threshold of an Esselunga shop, specifically Del Galluzzo in Florence, is no ordinary person if one considers his connection with the supermarket chain.
We are talking about Giuseppe Caprotti, the son of Esselunga’s founder Bernardo Caprotti, who worked in the family-owned large-scale retail chain for more than 30 years until the stormy epilogue that Giuseppe Caprotti himself decided in 2024 to make public in the book “Le Ossa dei Caprotti” in an unpublished narrative of testimonies and documents.
. Below: Giuseppe Caprotti and Leonardo Baroncini, on 23 June 2025.
The book brings aspects of the family’s affairs to the surface and, after the break-up with Bernardo Caprotti, allowed the author to go through an enormous pain, that of a son towards his father. “Esselunga is and will always be a part of my life,” he comments. Esselunga is a big family and the fact that I have returned to a shop that I helped to create has moved me, because I have met people I have worked with, with whom there is a relationship of esteem and affection.
This brought back emotions. Ties that time has not nicked, preserving – 21 years after the dismissal as a father – vibrations of the soul. “Human relationships are immaterial goods that no one can take away from me,’ he emphasises: years have passed, but with some it is as if we had spoken the day before.
In Esselunga there are projects that I wanted, some of which went through, others less so, but for some of them time is proving me right‘. That time not only gives back, but heals. “On 23 June, I entered the shop serenely, I was there shopping for my uncle Claudio Caprotti (Bernardo Caprotti ‘s brother),’ he concludes, ‘and with the same serenity I wrote and continue to write my story, dotting the i’s.
If I saw my father today? I would tell him that I love him.
I have moved on, I have worked on this, I am sorry for what happened, but I look forward. My present and my future is the Guido Venosta Foundation, which I chair’.
Below: the article in Il Cittadino of 5 July 2025. Thanks to Elisabetta Pioltelli
