If Mario and Vittorio Crespi were partners of my father Bernardo and Uncle Guido in the foundation of Esselunga, their niece Giulia Maria, for some fundamental years in the management of ‘Corriere della Sera’ and later founder of FAI-Fondo Ambiente Italiano and agricultural entrepreneur, was a friend of Bernardo’s ex-wife, my mother Giorgina…
It was for Aldo Bassetti that my mother Giorgina ended the suffocating marriage with my father Bernardo. Then they broke up for a long time, until 1983, when they met again, never to leave each other again until her death in 2021. Aldo, who came from a historic Lombard textile company, was a typical case of an ‘enlightened entrepreneur’.
Silvia is the middle sister. From the letters that have remained to us, she is seen to be very attached to the family. In 1922 she became engaged to Ernesto Thomas, who in that very year founded the wool mill in Brusimpiano on Lake Lugano that still bears his name, and married him in 1923. Aunt Silvia, who is also present in the lives and affection of her grandchildren, grandfather Peppino’s children, and whom I knew as a boy in the 1980s, spent her entire life in Brusimpiano, where she died very old in 1994.
marelli not only follows but also creates the market, through the company’s continuous innovations. Caprotti behaves similarly, starting with technological innovation and factory development, albeit in an entirely different sphere and with a product that is much more sensitive to the immediate demands of the market.
As in the past, the factory has continued to produce its fabrics in the present, updating to the fashions of the times some of its classics such as the checked or fancy fabrics, produced at least since the 1840s in the bright colours that were so popular and kept in production, updated in fabric and colour preferences, for more than a century more.
Of course, in keeping with family tradition, Grandma Luisa also passed on her passion for skiing to her children: in the photo on the left she is with Giorgina, perhaps at Sestrière in the 1950s, and in the one on the right with Giuseppe at Cervina, probably in the 1960s. Her elegance was famous.
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.
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 …
Ferruccio Quintavalle, father of my great-grandfather Umberto Quintavalle, was a history teacher in several Italian high schools, especially in Milan, and the author of several important publications on Italian history from the Unification to the First World War.
Bruno and Adele Quintavalle’s other children were also sportsmen, and at a high level: both Ferruccio, known as Illo, and Ida, grandmother Luisa Quintavalle’s twin sister, were tennis champions at national level, and Ferruccio also internationally, reaching the Wimbledon Tournament and the Davis Cup. Once his competitive activities were over, Illo was the driving force behind the Autobianchi car company, which produced the legendary ‘Bianchina’.
His great-grandfather Umberto, an engineer, was a great manager who came to the Milanese Magneti Marelli factory thanks to his brother Bruno Antonio who had married Paola, the founder’s daughter. Bruno Antonio and Umberto’s connection with the Fascist Party brought many benefits to the factory, which was visited several times by famous people.
Uncle Giuseppe, known as Beppo, who appears in many photos as a child with my mother Giorgina, became a journalist, specialising in the Middle East and writing for important magazines such as ‘Panorama’, ‘Il Mondo’, ‘Il Sole 24 Ore’ and the Secolo XIX. He was also an original guy, like many in the family; unfortunately he passed away in 1999.
Bursinel is a beautiful place, we spend part of the summer there, the photo albums are full of pictures of us children playing on the large lawn in front of the castle. But this too, like the rest, will become an object of contention and resentment
The chapel was the last of the Caprottis’ hearts, laid to rest in the bosom of their family, on their land. The chapel also managed to be a protagonist in my story, thanks to episodes between the comic and the grotesque.
The city of Milan dedicated a street to his grandfather, a side street in Viale Sarca, in recognition of the work of the ‘illustrious creator of the Cancer Research Association’, as the city council wrote in the resolution approving the initiative.
Grandfather Guido’s activities in the Italian Association for Cancer Research (AIRC) earned him many institutional and scientific awards. Among the most important were the appointment as Grand Officer of the Italian Republic in 1988, the Gold Medal of Civic Merit (‘Ambrogino d’Oro’) from the Municipality of Milan in 1989, and the Gold Medal of the Ministry of Health for civil merits in 1990.
My grandfather Guido Venosta, born in 1911, was the son of Giuseppe, a Pirelli engineer from the early 20th century who had the good fortune to experience the heroic season of tyres and the first Grand Prix. The family albums preserve many photographs of races from the 1920s, with his great-grandfather photographed with champions such as Campari, Nazzaro, Minoia and Antonio Ascari, and with his son Guido, who often followed his father. It is not known under what circumstances the photograph was taken, but he liked it so much that many copies were made, especially enlargements of the child, which are still in the archives today.
My sister Violetta was born a year and a half after me, in 1962. We are therefore quite close in age, so we share most of our lives, childhood and our boarding school years in Switzerland. After graduating from high school, she graduated with honours from Università Commerciale Luigi Bocconi in 1986, and after some time joined Esselunga
Bernardo (1925), Guido (1929) and Claudio (1938) in a beautiful shot from the late 1940s.
Peppino’s grandfather, a skilled entrepreneur, managed to get the family business back on its feet after the reckless actions of his father and uncle Emilio, and after the Second World War, having succeeded in obtaining Marshall Plan funds, he made it a textile industry excellence. His grandfather also showed remarkable financial skills, betting on shares in several companies including Pirelli and building up a substantial fortune that his sons later used to buy control of Esselunga.
Uncle Claudio [Caprotti], my father’s last brother, told me that Esselunga’s name was born at the time of the ‘Mille lire lunghe’ (One Thousand Long Lira) promotional campaign (1969 – 1971), curated by Alberto Gandin, one of the leading Italian advertisers of the time. The slogan was ‘come and spend 1,000 long Lira at the supermarket with the long esse’. From then on, customers began to call the supermarkets ‘Esselunga’, which was to become the name of the operating company while the holding company continued to be called Supermarkets Italiani.”
Prussian Blue’ is a pigment with an intense yet brilliant colour. My father Bernardo [Caprotti] was even obsessed with ‘Prussian Blue’. It also explains the first logo he wanted for Esselunga, a deep blue colour. Probably the transition from the Supermarket brand to the blue logo was supervised byArmando Testa, who had started working with my father in 1977
The fiercest of our competitors, the Coop, often boasts that they will have private label organic products in the future. So we burn it in time, going on the shelves with organic when they still only talk about it.
Esselunga was the first company, in May 2001, to obtain European Ecolabel recognition with its own-brand washing machine powder. The label was then extended to the Esselunga lines of detergents, paper products and textiles (also using organically grown cotton).
By adding to the logo of some Esselunga Bio products (coffee, sugar, bananas, cocoa) that of Fair Trade in cooperation with Ctm Altromercato, customers are clearly told that even in their choice of supplier they can help small producers mainly in developing countries, guaranteeing them work without exploitation and an adequate income
In 1995, we are also able to achieve profitability for all our products and categories with industrial accounting: this allows us to better target contracts, through buyers and sales in supermarkets, with the help of the marketing department. The three functions – purchasing, marketing and sales – are fundamental to the implementation and profitability of the company’s brand, whose operating result, from the 1990s to the early 2000s, is multiplied by 2.5
These days, supermarkets are a favourite target for theft and robbery because they are easy to access and always full of cash, open-air banks, you could say: Esselunga now has many shops, not only in Milan, and every night they call Dad to tell him about the day’s takings and the robberies that have taken place
With a great sense of humour, he was a lifelong friend, from his youth, of both my mother Giorgina [Venosta] and my uncle Claudio [Caprotti], in a photo Dado appears with my equally youthful mother at a costume ball at the Venosta house in 1954
Luigi Caccia Dominioni (1913 – 2016) is another of the well-rounded figures of architect, designer and urban planner who frequented the Caprotti family in the late 1950s
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.
Giuseppe Caprotti was born in Besana Brianza (MB) in the mid-19th century. One of the very few Westerners resident in Yemen, he established fruitful contacts with the local populations. In over 30 years of his stay, he amassed a rich and extremely valuable collection of manuscripts and antiquities. The most important part ended up in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan…
With the enormous development of the non-food part and the emergence of marketing, we create hundreds of jobs, to which more will be added in food purchasing and quality control. My rule is to move from ‘I’ to ‘we’: and results pay off, because an internal survey in 2003 conducted by CIRM shows that in two years the proportion of those declaring themselves ‘satisfied’ or ‘very satisfied’ has risen from 49 per cent to 72.1 per cent.
… This news is almost contemporaneous with a proposal of mine, in October 2004, to buy the majority share of Esselunga, a proposal that was rejected. At this point there was talk of four other offers, in particular one from the American giant Walmart; and Aldo Soldi, since 2004 president of ANCC – Coop, the National Association of Consumer Cooperatives, also expressed interest in buying it, because a move into foreign hands would have been a disaster for the Italian food economy. An unwise move, which will be among the reasons why Bernardo will publish his book Sickle and Cart in 2007.
(…) Let’s start thinking of a dossier that shows how, from both the members’ and the social point of view, cooperatives are enterprises like any other. It follows that the favourable conditions from which they benefit are state aid. We set up an internal working group and (…) gather all the necessary documentation to support our conviction. The dossier will then be taken to Brussels by Federdistribuzione and will change, at least in part, the taxation of cooperatives. Even Massimo D’Alema is moving in their defence but our victory, the fruits of which I will not be able to reap, is very important. (…)”. (G. CAPROTTI, Le Ossa dei Caprotti. Una storia italiana, Milan 20243, pp. 149; 187 – 188; p. 269).
In the 1950s, Bernardo Caprotti family asked the great Swiss graphic designer Max Huber, who would later design the logo for Supermarkets then Esselunga, to create a new logo for his cotton mill as well. The concept of the design also started, as for Supermarkets, from the idea of the initial letter – the C – artfully elongated to contain the full name of the company; in another version, the name is moved to the body of the letter, and in the eye of the C jumps the new, stylised, ultra-modern little goat.
In the 1950s, Bernardo Caprotti family approached the great Swiss graphic designer Max Huber, who would later design the logo for Supermarkets then Esselunga, to create a new logo for his cotton mill as well. This would later be included in a calendar of pictures taken by Ugo Mulas
Alessandro Belgiojoso is an internationally renowned photographer, husband of Albertina, daughter of Gianni Albertini D’Urso, in turn daughter of Gianni Albertini, an explorer and my great-uncle. Years ago, in 2008, I approached him to photograph a documentary collection kept in my archive, from which a panel exhibition was to be created in 2011. His uncle Giuseppe Barbiano di Belgiojoso (1924 – 2022) was a friend of my father Bernardo and probably also of my grandfather Peppino
Grandfather Guido, my mother Giorgina’s father, loved opera music. He had been brought up to listen to it and appreciate it since he was a boy, when he and his parents, dressed ‘in an Eton Jacket [a black three-button screwed jacket] and a big starched collar, white of course’, went to La Scala. It was the 1920s…
Unpublished episode revealing the egocentricity and mania for prominence of two of the three Caprotti brothers, Bernardo Caprotti and Guido Caprotti, who for many years were close friends and then became rivals. Looking at the photo, one of the mentioned sequoias is the second from the left
Tomás Maldonado (1922-2018), born in Buenos Aires, was a lecturer in Industrial Design in Architecture at the Milan Polytechnic, a chair he established in 1994. When he met Inge Feltrinelli, Giangiacomo’s recently widowed wife, he moved from operational design to a more intellectual role. He lived with Inge for over forty years, dying just over two months after her
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…
