Good evening Dr Caprotti,
i have just finished reading, as avidly as I have in a long time, your book “Le Ossa dei Caprotti” and I hope I am doing you a favour by sharing these thoughts.
First of all, I would like to say thank you, for having highlighted so many personal traits of your family in a sincere way, which is far from being taken for granted, despite the internal discontents and disagreements, even today there is still often a tendency to let people outside the family circle see an unblemished and idyllic image of the family; I would also like to thank you for the sincere and meticulous way in which you have written your book, especially the way in which you have always argued your points, and from whose general approach your humanistic studies are evident, but also your years of experience in business, which could certainly earn you an honorary degree in management engineering or marketing and economics.
Secondly, I wanted to tell you that you immediately aroused a strong empathy in me, because, with all due proportion (I am not talking about prominent Italian families like yours, but about small-scale entrepreneurship with a provincial character), my family too has experienced two business divisions, the first between my grandfather and his brother, and the second between my father and my uncle, and I too, always done in due proportion (for me it represents a second job and not my main activity), assisted my father in the management of his small, indeed very small, business and I found myself in situations where there were disagreements and misunderstandings; now, among other things, we are at a time when we will probably be forced to close down a business that has reached the fourth generation with me, and it was not difficult for me to imagine your state of mind and your thoughts when you were first ousted and then forced to give up the family business (for the sake of completeness, I would like to tell you that my father kept a ‘weak’ branch of the business, while the more profitable one remained with my uncle and my cousins, so entrepreneurially you are more like your uncles than your father).
I conclude by wishing that this experience of yours, which has already given birth to a book, can be fully metabolised and also evolve into a source of teaching, for your children and for others close to you, as I try to do with the experiences that have marked me to date.
I very much hope that I too will have children, that I will have the opportunity to be their bow and that they can resemble Her in knowledge, way of thinking and being; I will cherish the poetry She has given me the opportunity to know for the rest of my life.
Fabio Rossi, 23/7/24
