In an attempt to save the company from the textile crisis of the 1970s, Guido Caprotti gradually sold off his entire stake in Esselunga, before being forced to sell off the textile business as well.Caught up in the same family dispute, his mother Marianne also saw her inherited share wiped out, without warning or any compensation whatsoever.
Marcello Cestaro, who heads one of the groups that make up Selex, jokingly describes our merger as that between ‘the beauty’ – that is, Esselunga, probably the ‘most beautiful’ chain in Europe – and ‘the beast’, namely Selex…From them, however, we learn a huge lesson in humility: the beast, in fact, helps the beauty enormously to understand the market and double its profitability
For over a century, the Caprotti factory in Albiate was a place of work, identity and memory. Its logo – the goat – and the names of its fabrics evoked strength and prestige: Leone, Vittoria, Cleopatra. Others linked the product to Italy’s geographical identity, such as Calabria and Tevere. Still others, such as Jolanda and Marina, followed the fashion of the time, or current events, such as Tosca, linked to Puccini’s opera.
The story of Silvia and Filippo, who made the whole of Milan dream: the charming Silvia Tofanelli, with her host of suitors, met Filippo Rusca, the most eccentric of his time, when the ‘ganzi’ were all the rage. They fell in love, got together, left their other partners behind, became the talk of Milan’s high society, and got married. They were a happy couple. He has passed away; this is how she remembers him. We, who saw them as the most beautiful couple of their time.
In the past, factory owners usually lived on the factory premises. This was also the case with the Caprotti family, who, before purchasing the villa in Albiate at the end of the nineteenth century, lived in the villa within the factory complex, which still stands today, although it is almost completely overgrown.
Do I want to spend long days surrounded by books and archive documents, on my own, seeing hardly anyone? Or do I want to work, engaging with the real world every day? The answer would come years later; I would have enjoyed teaching. But even the outcome of my experience ‘in the real world’, as Kundera writes, will not have been ‘a dream’: Esselunga was a great passion of mine; I enjoyed myself and, to use an Anglicism, I did ‘good things’.
In line with the vision of its founder, Guido Venosta, the Guido Venosta European Foundation, established in 2000, has produced studies on the management of social enterprises and on the ethics of solidarity and social responsibility.
Andrea Solbiati (1928–2014), heir to another Lombard textile dynasty, a great tennis player and a passionate football fan with a deep-rooted loyalty to AC Milan, was the man who introduced me to my childhood idols, starting with Gianni Rivera. In the late 1980s, together with Federico Castelbarco Albani, he founded the ‘Clubino’ football team, for which I played for more than 10 years. I still have the football books Andrea gave me, and they are particularly dear to me, just as he was – and still is.
The first photograph comes from a series taken at Lina’s second bachelorette party, in November 1993, on the eve of her marriage to Marco Romano, an event that Sotis herself also recalled with nostalgia in an interview for ‘il Giornale’ in April 2015: ‘Yes, it was nice. Readings, music, beautiful. There was Natalia Aspesi, Inge Feltrinelli, Rosellina Archinto, Stella Pende, Gioia Marchi Falck , Mita De Benedetti, Antonella Camerana, Giorgina Venosta…’.
The “dischi per l’AIRC ” was an important charitable initiative. The first record, titled Cantautori s.r.l. (speranze-rabbie libertà), was released in 1979 and stands as a unique and historic album, bringing together for the first time 13 songs by 13 singer-songwriters — Lucio Dalla, Francesco Guccini, Alan Sorrenti, Edoardo Bennato, Luciano Rossi, Fabrizio De André, Giorgio Gaber, Alberto Radius, Eugenio Finardi, Ivan Graziani, Angelo Branduardi, Francesco De Gregori and Roberto Vecchioni — the creators and defining voices of a new way of making music.
Grandma Luisa was a fascinating mixture of intelligence, culture, fashion and lightness. A translator from French and English for major national publishing houses, author of a volume of poetry, she also had a love of the ‘good life’. She never missed an event, a meeting, a premiere at La Scala, and was always noticed, beautiful among the beautiful, so much so that she was portrayed more than once in the cartoons of the famous journalist and illustrator Bruna Mateldi Moretti, now ‘recognised (…) as a key figure of our cultural twentieth century’.
After years of meticulous research and historical reconstruction, my new book Le Ossa dei Caprotti is out. At the centre of the narrative, the events of my family from the textile business at the beginning of the 19th century to the birth and development of Esselunga, debunking myths and legends
Shortly before the Second World War, Umberto Quintavalle, vice-president of Magneti Marelli and my maternal great-grandfather, bought the marvellous Ripalte estate on the island of Elba and turned it into a place of delight, especially for hunting, but also for relatives and friends to stay. When great-grandfather Umberto died in 1959, the property passed to one of his daughters, my grandmother Luisa Quintavalle, who was married in her second marriage to Marquis Nicolò Theodoli. With her, summer periods at Ripalte are one of the most beautiful childhood memories.
Shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, his maternal great-grandfather Umberto Quintavalle bought the splendid estate on the Elbe promontory; his grandmother sold it, which was a pity. Today it is part of a tourist group that also produces wine.
Original and revolutionary Uncle Beppo, my mother Giorgina’s brother, was an original and revolutionary type, a great Carlo Marx-like beard and an active participant in Sixty-Eight and the ’68ism’ that followed. A journalist of great class, foreign correspondent from the Middle East for many years, an ironic and provocative person, he died of cancer, the disease that his father, grandfather Guido Venosta, had fought so long and so effectively with AIRC. Grandfather fortunately did not have to see him, having died the year before.
Once he graduated, Claudio joined the company where his two older brothers, my father Bernardo and my uncle Guido, were already working. In an interview published in an American newspaper in 1968, the author describes him as one of the guys who ‘did wonders’ at the Italian Supermarkets.
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’.
Their speciality is prefabricated buildings. It was primarily for this reason that they came into contact with the Caprotti family, first for the Albiate textile factory, then for Esselunga, for whom they built many supermarkets throughout the country and a large part of the facilities at the Limito head office.
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.
After the First World War, Albiate underwent a phase of great transformation and in 1929 inaugurated the new town hall, destined to serve as town hall, school and clinic, also as a memorial to the 60 fallen and missing in the town. The building was realised thanks to a collective subscription and the contribution of several benefactor families, including the Caprotti family. In the archives of Villa San Valerio emerges the correspondence between my grandfather Peppino Caprotti and the architect Alberto Sartoris, who was commissioned to design both the building and the family chapel in the Albiate cemetery.
In June 1952, grandfather Peppino died in a car accident while returning from a deer hunt in Austria. Peppino had been elected mayor of Albiate only a year earlier. A few days later, the whole town attended the mayor’s funeral. Peppino was also remembered in the first of the annual pamphlets that the municipal administration published at the end of each of its terms. The story of Peppino and his family has always intersected with that of his village, and in “Le Ossa dei Caprotti” I have narrated it.
Caprotti’s men were sanguine, quarrelsome characters, easily ignited, competitive and sometimes ruthless. But they could also be cheerful, enthusiastic, vital, and feel a deep affection for the family, although this same powerful vitalism and strong competitiveness often led to misunderstandings and jealousies that were difficult if not impossible to reconcile. Grandpa Peppino’s story is not very different from the general picture.
I remember the steel marbles and bolts thrown at the entrance of our school, the Leo XIII, run by the Jesuits and considered right-wing at the time. (…)”. Just at school one day a mysterious phone call wanted to call me out of class, but fortunately I did not take the bait. I dread to think what would have happened if I had
Automobiles soon entered Caprotti’s life, from the very first still with tyres that were not dyed black, and with them the drivers: Giannetto, more than a century ago, and then ‘el Gigèt’ and ‘el Silvèt’, whom I also knew and who were even witnesses in my birth certificate.
Our lives as children are entrusted from birth to ‘young ladies’, experienced nannies who look after us like second mothers. I like the German Waltraud, the first one: At home we call her ‘Schwester’ and you can even recognise her in my christening photos. Once she has left her job in our family to return home to Germany, she will send us a souvenir photo in a police uniform, with a German shepherd at her side
There is a long list of closely trusted people with whom the families of yesteryear surrounded themselves and filled their homes, people who called their employers by name (‘scior Bernardo’, ‘sciora Bettina’, ‘scior Peppin’), knew more about their lives sometimes than themselves, and were always there at every important family event, with pride and sometimes even emotion.
Since the end of the 19th century, when the Caprotti family bought the villa, much of the family history passed through that house, and continues to do so. Many photographs recount it, many memories that have remained in the letters and in the souls of those who lived them, and bring back serene photos among the trees, the games in the courtyard, the animals that once were, even the old carriages that the family used for a long time, even after the advent of cars, and which still exist.
The voyage on the pack refers to the value of enterprise, to the importance of the help that one man can give to other men. It is a hymn to hope that must not die. Albertini will do other things in life. His work and passion for golf will absorb him completely. Of that adventure there is little emphasis. If he thinks about it, he weeps.Today, when everything is spectacle, appearances, narcissism, selfishness, a virtual bubble in which the false is confused with the true, that journey is not just a testimony to courage, it is an adventure driven also by a moral duty. It was enough for Albertini to know that he had done what was right. Not out of duty, but because it was right to do so. A universal lesson.
After the First World War (1919-1921), Bernardo Caprotti, grandfather Peppino’s father, founded the ‘Società Mutua Cooperativa di Consumo’ with Galeazzo Viganò and some technicians and workers from their respective factories, to lower the prices of basic necessities.
It may seem almost a twist of fate, given the facts of the Caprotti family’s history, but great-grandfather Bernardo Caprotti was among the founders of no less than two mutual aid cooperatives. One still exists today in Albiate and has four supermarkets.
Since the 1920s at least, everyone in the family has been skiing, great-grandparents, fathers and grandchildren, boys and girls: from great-grandfather Umberto Quintavalle, who ended his life in a crevasse under the eyes of his grandmother Adele, to grandmother Luisa and her children, my mother Giorgina and uncle Beppo, from great-grandfather Giuseppe Venosta, President of the Sport Club Pirelli to grandfather Guido, from his brother Gigi Venosta, who in addition to skiing was also a national hockey player, to Gianni Albertini, husband of aunt Ida Quintavalle, who was also a masterful climber and Arctic explorer. And up to us, children of that passion that we still continue.
Pirelli joined AIRC in the mid-1960s, supported the association by hosting and producing its advertising, ensuring regular visibility in its internal publications, and backing public fundraising initiatives. Within Pirelli, AIRC found in Guido Venosta, Director of the Tyres Division, a key point of reference who helped shape the organisation’s communications and fundraising approach—an effort that led from music compilation albums featuring leading artists and sold in support of AIRC (1979–1981) to pioneering television formats such as RAI’s Storie al microscopio in 1995.
When things finally returned to normal, with the Pirelli brothers once again leading their company, Venosta was already a highly regarded senior executive. His command of English and familiarity with Anglo-Saxon customs, led him to pursue a career strongly shaped by international relations, culminating in 1956 with his appointment as General Manager (and later Managing Director) of Pirelli Ltd. After returning to Italy, he was placed in charge of the General Management of the Tyres Division, the backbone of Pirelli’s business, until 1970. He would conclude his career in 1977.
After earning two degrees—Economics at the University of Cambridge and Law at the University of Pavia—Guido Venosta entered the workforce: first, briefly, at Banco Ambrosiano, then at several Pirelli subsidiaries and affiliated companies. In July 1939, he was finally hired at the company’s headquarters, where he would spend his entire career.
Giorgina is 17 when she marries Bernardo. In the wedding photos she is gorgeous, he a little awkward; he is 32 years old, almost twice as old as his wife, and a charming man, full of charm. She also marries him because her parents do not get along, and for her the wedding is a chance to escape an environment full of negativity.
In 1893 Lucie Amélie Kampmann, one of my great-grandmother Fernande’s sisters, my grandmother Marianne Maire Caprotti’s mother, married Baltimore-born Julian Ellinger and moved with him to the United States. Their son Alfred, grandmother’s cousin, will be the conduit for obtaining Marshall Plan funds for Manifattura Caprotti.
In 1922, my grandfather Peppino Caprotti was sent to study at the prestigious textile training school in Épinal, a town in the Vosges region of French Lorraine, where Marianne Maire lived. The two quickly and permanently fell in love: in 1923 Peppino graduated, and the following year he married Marianne.
Grandfather Peppino was born in 1899. After attending primary schools, he was sent for two years to study in Switzerland, at a boarding school that is now called Institut auf der Rosemberg, and is known for the excellence of its teaching as well as its discipline, so much so that I almost ended up there myself…
The castle of Bursinel, in the canton of Vaud, was bought after the war by grandfather Peppino, and together with Villa Nadina, in Forte dei Marmi, it is one of the places of the heart. At Bursinel we all get together, uncles cousins brothers grandmothers and great-grandmothers, and we children play for hours on the castle’s large lawn. My father gave it to my sister who is selling it, much to my regret.
Deciding to have a permanent home in Milan, grandfather Peppino Caprotti purchased an entire building in the central Via del Lauro. The renovation is overseen by Luigi Caccia Dominioni, an architect, designer and urban planner of international renown, convinced by his grandmother Marianne Maire Caprotti thanks to her particularly tenacious character, which Caccia Dominioni, now 100 years old, still remembered.
Your book, Giuseppe Maria Giorgio Caprotti, is wonderful; it has really opened my eyes to the history of modern distribution. Thank you
Highly topical issues covered in a detailed, compelling and engaging manner. It could provide plenty of inspiration for the big…
I will always remember you. Those two years on your team gave me the strength to look to the future. I’ve just finished reading your book. It was very moving. Thank you for the professional training you gave me, and thank you for the new energy you’ve instilled in me after reading it.
Dr Giuseppe (that’s what we always called him at the company) was, for us newcomers, a guiding light and a role model. I would like to highlight the professional, personal and moral depth of the man who embodied the future. A motivator, a natural mentor to whom, following the publication of his book, I feel even more attached
In my view, the difference between journalism, political non-fiction and history lies in the research, which, in the case of history, is much more in-depth and is based, first and foremost, on the study of documents and archives. But the added value of this book also lay in the contributions from people who worked for or were close to Esselunga, a company with a much broader entrepreneurial spirit than one might think
Good evening, Dr Caprotti, I have just finished reading your book *Le Ossa dei Caprotti* with a voracity I haven’t…
Book read with feelings that oscillated between amazement and anger but nevertheless I am not surprised. I enjoyed it very…
On the emotional wave of the end of the book, I only feel a strong empathy for the author, who…
