My mother Giorgina Venosta and her second husband Aldo Bassetti, also as FGV councillors, were among the first in Italy to combine solidarity and love for animals by financing the ‘Progetto Arca’ initiative, a house in Milan to house homeless people with animals. ‘Cascina Vita Nova’ is dedicated to the memory of their mother.
My mother loves art, becomes an expert, makes it her job. She also puts solidarity into her passion for art: a close friend of Giulia Maria Crespi, founder of FAI – Fondo per l’ambiente italiano, she contributes generously to its activities and finances important restorations.
After the separation from my father Bernardo, my mother found a valuable companion for a long time in Guido Somarè, a talented painter like his brother Sandro. The latter has a house in Greece, and regularly hosts his brother with his mother and us children, my sister Violetta and I; we spend happy times here.
When my mother met Aldo Bassetti, her marriage to my father Bernardo went into crisis and the two separated. She and Aldo later break up, only to meet again in 1983 and never leave each other again. When Giorgina dies in 2021, Aldo does not survive her for long, joining her the following year.
My grandfather Guido Venosta was born in 1911 in Milan, to Giuseppe, an engineer and future general manager of the Pirelli factory in Milan, and Argia Neri. Guido played football passionately, and he often met players, some of whom worked at Pirelli and played for the still young AC Milan, founded in 1899.
My great-grandfather Giuseppe Venosta (1880 – 1939), an engineer, spent his entire working life at Pirelli until he was appointed General Manager in 1938, a few months before his death. Grandfather Guido was very close to him, and his death deeply upset him.
My great-grandfather Giuseppe believes that his son must learn English perfectly, the language of the future. He therefore decides that his son should spend all of his high school and high school summer holidays in England, with a family. Guido returns ‘anglicised’, rich in experience.
After graduating from high school, my grandfather Guido Venosta fulfilled his military obligation. Wanting to join the cavalry, he attended the officer school in Pinerolo, then was assigned to the Savoia Cavalry, where he developed the great passion for riding that would accompany him throughout his life.
After completing his military service, my grandfather, Guido Venosta, enrolled at Cambridge University in England, whose school of economics is internationally renowned. At the same time he studied law at the University of Pavia, and within a few years he graduated from both universities.
Within 10 years, between 1939 and 1949, my grandfather Guido Venosta’s father and mother died of what was then considered an invincible disease, cancer. This had a tremendous impact on Guido, laying the foundations for the feeling that, more than 20 years later, would lead him to become involved in AIRC.
When war is declared (1940), grandfather Guido is called up to arms. When fascism collapses, he manages to return to the North. His mother Argia instead moves to Gornate Olona, in the house that was her late husband’s last purchase. Guido’s two brothers, Luigi and Giorgio, also go to war and manage to return.
Guido Venosta joined Pirelli in 1939, three months after the death of his father, who had been its General Manager. After the war he became Managing Director of Pirelli Ltd. based in London. He returned to Italy and continued working there until 1977. For more than a decade he would have two jobs: in 1966 he joined the newly founded AIRC, to which he would make a fundamental contribution until his death in 1998.
Grandfather Guido’s contacts with the (now defunct) Italian Liberal Party began after his return from London. He joined the Party and was a member of the Council of three Mayors from 1964 to 1986. During that time, he represented the municipality on the board of the Piccolo Teatro in Milan.
In 1966, my grandfather Guido agreed to join a ‘small association’ to promote awareness of the ‘unmentionable disease’, cancer. Over twenty years later, the ‘small association’ would become AIRC – the National Association for Cancer Research.
Among AIRC’s most distinctive public events are ‘The Research Azalea’ and ‘The Oranges of Health’. One and the other are a reason for public attention in the cities where they take place, so they have become a symbol of AIRC anywhere in the country.
Thanks to the work of my grandfather Guido Venosta, but also to favourable economic, social and cultural circumstances, AIRC was successful and grew. In 1975 my grandfather was elected President, a role he held for twenty years, structuring the organisation at a managerial level that was then unique in the field of solidarity.
In conceiving the grand design of the Association, my grandfather Guido had the winning idea: that of spreading the activity and interest in the Association at a national level, focusing on regional representatives with local mentality, customs and sensibilities, but also precise and fast contact with headquarters.
In 1982, my grandfather Guido Venosta, President of AIRC, promoted the Italian Foundation for Cancer Research (FIRC) alongside the Association, an organisation that was destined to ensure a solid foundation for cancer research over time.
In 1996, FIRC, the Italian Foundation for Cancer Research, established a biennial prize for researchers who have translated the achievements of scientific knowledge into tools for therapeutic intervention. After his death in 1998, the prize was named after my grandfather Guido Venosta.
In 1996, FIRC – the Italian Foundation for Cancer Research, chaired by my grandfather Guido, allowed the University of Milan to establish the Chair of Medical Oncology at the Faculty of Medicine and Surgery, a teaching that until then was only at the level of individual specialisations.
FIRC Research Units, the first initiative of their kind in Italy, are scientific units established, controlled and financed directly by the Italian Foundation for Cancer Research (FIRC) at the country’s major research facilities.
His commitment and achievements earned my grandfather Guido awards and recognitions, including the appointment as Grand Officer of the Italian Republic (1988), the Gold Medal of Civic Merit (‘Ambrogino d’Oro’) of the Municipality of Milan (1989), and the Gold Medal of the Ministry of Health for civil merits (1990).
In 1997, my grandfather Guido Venosta published a booklet for Scheiwiller, small in format and pages but large in content, in which he explained his history with cancer and AIRC and set out the concepts and hopes that animated his actions.
My grandfather Guido Venosta’s brilliant and precocious intuition, still valid today, was to have been able to identify the need to transfer efficient practices from the world of production to the world of solidarity, and to show how it could be done. A true method, which also inspired specific university teachings.
I was born in Milan on 15 December 1960, the son of Bernardo Caprotti and Giorgina Venosta. After several experiences abroad, I joined Esselunga Spa, of which I became CEO. Today I am an Entrepreneur, President of the Guido Venosta Foundation and an author.
In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Guido Venosta Foundation finances the purchase of equipment (e.g. masks) or specialised machinery, and projects such as scientific research on vaccines, the setting up of intensive care units in hospitals, and the ‘Solidarity Taxi’ in Milan.
In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, the FGV finances the ‘Solidarity Taxi’ for the free transport of elderly people and citizens with severe difficulties in general, who can thus leave their homes for various essential activities.
In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, FGV is one of the funders of the IEO (European Institute of Oncology) in Milan for extensive serological tests that will later be used for a clinical trial whose concluding paper, published in October 2021, demonstrated the efficacy of anti-Covid vaccines.
In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, both as a private individual and as President of the FGV, I donate complete patient monitoring systems for 12 beds in the Intensive Care Unit at the Policlinico di Milano, which have helped to drastically reduce mortality since the beginning of the epidemic.
The first of the new FGV’s cultural projects was the contribution to the ‘Ri-Abitiamo Milano’ project, developed by the Amici della Triennale, which under the leadership of Elena Tettamanti involved thousands of Milanese high school students in rethinking the places of their city in a sustainable way.
The project of the ‘Società storica lombarda’ – of which I am a councillor -, ‘Enter the library with a click’, brings high school students closer to old books and documents to introduce them to the history of Milan and Lombardy, and uses both IT and direct consultation to do so.
Carla Fossati Bellani Venosta (1924 – 2019) married my grandfather Guido Venosta in 1949. An internationally renowned architect and designer, she won the Compasso d’Oro award twice. After her husband’s death (1997), she set up the ‘Fondazione Europea Guido Venosta’ to honour his memory and continue his work.
After the death of my grandfather Guido Venosta (1998), his widow, Carla Fossati Bellani Venosta, decided to give continuity to her husband’s thinking by creating the ‘Fondazione Europea Guido Venosta, l’uomo contro il cancro’ (European Foundation Guido Venosta, the man against cancer) in 2000, which she was actively involved in until 2017. Since 2020, I have been President and Treasurer of the Foundation.
In 2004, the FGV instituted the ‘Il Ponte’ prize, which until 2014 is awarded annually to personalities or organisations that have achieved a significant transition of values between the profit and non-profit worlds, according to the vision of my grandfather Guido Venosta.
Carla Fossati Bellani Venosta, Guido Venosta’s second wife, was one of Italy’s leading design architects. Politically committed above all to the cause of improving the status of women, she deserves to be better known to the non-specialist public.
In 2008 The ‘Il Ponte’ Prize unites two moments: on the one hand the traditional from profit to nonprofit (solidarity economy), on the other hand ‘design for development’ (development as an end), conceived in the ethics of civil commitment.
In addition to naming a street in Milan in honour of Guido Venosta and instituting the ‘Il Ponte’ Prize, the FGV has also committed itself to its fundamental objectives by financing university scholarships, promoting cycles of conversations and round tables on ethical finance, publishing an annual newsletter and thematic books.
Giuseppe Caprotti: a distant relative, born a few kilometres from Albiate, lives in San’a’. In what is now the capital of Yemen, the explorer Caprotti would spend thirty years, contributing to the spread of coffee in Italy – the Arabica variety, which is the most prized, came from the Yemeni city of Mokha
Lina Sotis, a journalist and writer, always present in Milanese salons, also a ‘girl from the Forte’ in the golden age, was a dear friend of my mother Giorgina Venosta, and in an article in July 2001 she painted a delightful portrait of my mother as a young man, complete with a small episode related to the actor Renato Salvatori, a protagonist of the great post-war period of Italian cinema, but first a lifeguard on the beaches of Forte dei Marmi, and madly in love with the ‘seductive and shy’ Giorgina Venosta.
In the 1960s and 1970s, my mother Giorgina was a companion of Guido Somarè, a talented painter with art in his blood for several generations, and she had been going with him to Lindos, a place on the island of Rhodes, since at least 1966. Violetta and I first came to Lindos in 1969, after an interminable journey that had taken us across the Isthmus of Corinth by boat…
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 lies 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…
