Caprotti and supermarkets: James Hugh Angleton, father of James Jesus, 1960s
Among the most important art collectors who were also Brunelli's clients in those years was James Hugh Angleton, president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Italy. Brunelli told me that Angleton had revealed to him Nelson Rockefeller's idea of studying the opening of a chain of supermarkets in Italy already during the exhibition on the "Settecento Veneziano" curated by Brunelli himself, and being the contact person for Rockefeller and his company IBEC in Italy he was sounding out the terrain in search of local partners willing to join the American magnate in the venture.
The Caprotti family, the birth of Esselunga and US counter-espionage: James Hugh and James Angleton
Film buffs who have seen Robert De Niro's 2006 film The Good Shepherd - The Shadow of Power may know that the main character, played by Matt Damon, is inspired by James James Angleton, one of the most legendary and controversial figures in American intelligence. However, the figure of James Hugh [Angleton], the father, is also of extreme interest ...
Kirillov, Putin’s man of poisons and propaganda. With a role in Italy too
Kirillov did a ‘very good job’ and indeed, today, much of Italian public opinion would be in favour of Ukraine surrendering to Putin’s Russia, without looking too much at the conditions imposed by Russia and the possible consequences of raising the white flag.
Manifattura Caprotti: safety at work in a textile company
Caprotti, like Marelli (to whom they would later be related), were undoubtedly forerunners, and in many ways can be counted among the ‘unexpected entrepreneurs’ because they present aspects of modernity, of planning, of ideas that we would not have suspected in people who have been producing textiles since the days of looms in peasant homes, and are therefore concerned with a cold and impersonal thing called ‘progress’
‘The Cold War of Supermarkets’: CIA fighting Coop?
There is a huge difference between news reporting and history
The Caprotti family: my maternal grandfather Guido Caprotti Venosta, c. 1970s?
My grandfather Guido Venosta, the more introverted of the Venosta brothers, graduated from Cambridge and Pavia and worked all his life as an executive at Pirelli; in 1966 he became involved in the Italian Association for Cancer Research (today the Italian Foundation for Cancer Research - AIRC), which he transformed into Italy's largest private funding body in the fight against cancer. Initiatives that have made the history of fundraising for the non-profit world, such as the 'Health Oranges' and the 'Research Azaleas' (...), were born thanks to him.
The Caprotti family and sport: Uncle Luigi Venosta called Gigi, hockey and medals
Luigi Venosta, called Gigi, my grandfather's second brother, was 'the most popular Italian player' of ice hockey in the 1930s, as 'La Gazzetta dello Sport' described him, wearing among other things the Azzurri jersey for more than twenty games. During the war he was an aviator, and earned a silver medal in the field. In the photo, Gigi Venosta is last in the back, in the breakaway, wearing the dark jersey.
My grandfather Giuseppe Caprotti, called Peppino (1889- 1952), the First World War, the textile factory and Esselunga
From my grandfather’s medals to ‘Le Ossa dei Caprotti’, with the insider trading in Pirelli shares bought with profits from the factory
The Caprotti family and the supermarkets: Marco Brunelli, Bernardo Caprotti and Giorgina Venosta at the “Cervo d’Oro” in Cortina, February 1958
From the very beginning, Marco Brunelli struggled to get along with Bernardo Caprotti. The first disagreements began to manifest themselves blatantly in early 1960. In May, Brunelli and my uncle Guido founded a chain of supermarkets together with the aim of focusing on Rome, the city that IBEC's men had discarded...
The Caprotti family and the supermarkets: Guido Caprotti with Marco Brunelli and two friends, 1950s
Marco Brunelli, a close friend of Guido Caprotti's since high school, and a member of one of Milan's most prominent families, was the first to come into contact with the American IBEC and its plan to open a series of supermarkets in Italy, and he also brought Guido and Bernardo into the negotiations. This dispels, at least in part, the story always told in the family that, thanks to a fortunate conversation overheard at the Grand Hotel in St. Moritz, the Caprotti family had entered as protagonists in the negotiations together with Brunelli. The latter later became the first president of Supermarkets Italiani, later Esselunga.
