Guido Caprotti, the less famous brother

Guido Caprotti was one of the pioneers of large-scale distribution in Italy, a partner from the beginning of 'Supermarkets italiani' (later Esselunga), he later founded with Marco Brunelli 'La Romana Supermarkets' (later GS). Later he and his brothers bought the majority of Esselunga from the Americans. Despite this role, his name has remained at the margins of the public narrative. Unjustly so. Because to his and Brunelli's intuition we owe an important part of the start of modern distribution in Italy. It is no coincidence that back in 1959, La Stampa described him as 'a giant of entrepreneurship'.

Caprotti and the company Ing. A. Morganti: the future in construction

The history of 'Impresa di costruzioni Ing. A. Morganti' (from 2012 'Morganti Impresa di Costruzioni S.p.A.'), is closely intertwined with the history of construction in Italy throughout the 20th century, giving life and completion to many major projects involving houses, roads, industries and, their speciality, prefabricated structures. For this reason above all they came into contact with the Caprotti family, first for the Albiatese textile factory, then for Esselunga, for which they built many supermarkets throughout the country and a large part of the structures of the Limito headquarters.

The Albiate bridge and Mayor Peppino Caprotti

In the early 1950s, the 19th-century bridge in Albiate, built at the time of carts and wagons, was now inadequate for modern vehicle traffic and too low to withstand the flooding of the Lambro. The municipal council led by Peppino Caprotti, my grandfather, who was elected mayor in the summer of 1951, began to deal with it, because in that very year the Lambro was still overflowing. During his brief period at the head of the Albiatese municipal administration (he died in a car accident the following year), Peppino had time to lay the foundations for the important project to rebuild the bridge.

Giuseppe Caprotti: ‘From trolleys to history, the luck of living more lives’

What will we read about in your new book? ‘I tell another side of the family through two extraordinary explorers: my eponymous ancestor Giuseppe Caprotti, who lived thirty years in Yemen, and my great uncle Gianni Albertini, a skier and mountaineer who explored the North Pole’.