“Giorgina wakes up every morning full of suffering. She looks outside the house for the affection her husband does not give her. She also commits a mortal sin: she falls in love with a left-wing man, Aldo Bassetti, in disagreement with the rest of the family – the Bassettis were textile entrepreneurs too – because of his political ideas.
Aldo was part of a group of young and brilliant shareholders of the weekly ‘L’Espresso,’ as the founder Eugenio Scalfari was to recall: ‘They were gathered in a company called Piccolo Naviglio, and they were all young heirs of industrial dynasties from the north and all politically and culturally close to our ideas. There was Roberto Olivetti, son of Adriano, Vittorio Olcese and Aldo Bassetti who, although he came from a family of very Catholic traditions, was on secular, indeed anticlerical positions’, he wrote in 2015′. (G. CAPROTTI, “Le Ossa dei Caprotti”, p. 88).
My father discovered evidence of his wife’s betrayal by having her followed; his mother, grandmother Marianne [Maire in Caprotti], came to Aldo’s mother escorted by a priest, accusing her son of ruining her family. Giorgina abandoned the house in Albiate and that narrow life; she broke up with Aldo, had other affairs, but met him again in 1983, this time to marry him [in the 2000s] and never leave him again. Mama passed away in 2021; Aldo would follow her just over a year later, in 2022. (Ibid.).
Also born in 1926 into a historic family of entrepreneurs known above all for textiles (fabrics and household linens), with a degree in civil engineering, Aldo Bassetti was the older brother of Piero, a great athlete, Christian Democrat politician and the first president of the Lombardy Region, to whom he left the management of the family business to set up his own business, founding in 1952 the CPI – Compagnia Padana per investimenti, whose aim was innovative investments in industrial initiatives with a business purpose and a long-term perspective, as well as various initiatives in the venture capital sector. In this perspective, his strong political commitment to the left does not seem to have been a hindrance when, with another financial company, COFISA, of which he was chairman, he acquired 80 per cent of Officine Marconi, a Mantua-based company that operated in the sector of large repairs of common and military vehicles (including tanks). Finally, he did not disdain, certainly showing flair and foresight, investments in the medical and technological sectors.
Since the mid-1950s, he was a shareholder in the weekly ‘L’Espresso’ and later, with Eugenio Scalfari and Carlo Carlo Caracciolo, among the founders of the daily ‘La Repubblica’ in 1975. A photo in my archives immortalises all three of them several years later, as if ‘La Repubblica’ was walking side by side. Scalfari was obviously at home with Aldo and Giorgina, who were not yet married, and I happened to meet him several times.
Entrepreneurship and taste for art also crossed paths with Bassetti: in 1960, the Splügen Bräu brewery opened in Corso Europa. Bassetti commissioned the brothers Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni, famous architects, to design the famous ‘Splügen’ lamp for the Flos company, which has become a design icon [Aldo Bassetti told me that, like his aunt Carla Fossati Bellani in Venosta, it had won several gold compasses]. The atmosphere of that unusual place was immortalised in shots by Ugo Mulas, a photographer who was also famous by then and who was also linked from the beginning to the Caprotti family, with whom he collaborated on several advertising shots for the products of their Brianza textile factory.
The architects – the ‘archistars’ as we would say in modern terms – were often also close and dear friends of the Bassetti-Venosta couple. In my mother’s archive, several photos immortalise Vico Magistretti (designer of many Bassetti homes, especially Giansandro, Aldo and Piero’s older brother), Michele De Lucchi or Mario Bottawandering around their lake house, and not infrequently my mother and Aldo spent holidays with some of them, as evidenced by clear pictures in Greece with Beppo Modenese, the ‘creator’ of ‘Made in Italy’ fashion, and his partner Piero Pinto, the architect and interior designer to whom we owe famous creations both in Italy and abroad [Vico Magistretti and Mario Botta would also work for Esselunga].
In the 1960s, Bassetti became president of the ADI-Association for Industrial Design; he was then a councillor of the Milan Triennale, and finally President of the Amici di Brera from 2007 to 2020, a position he held very dear and to which he dedicated his time, talent and generosity, promoting and financing restorations and enhancements of the Pinacoteca’s spaces, so much so that the Sala della Passione, located in the Brera ‘s courtyard of honour, which he loved so much and the site of many of the Association’s meetings and initiatives (as well as his secular funeral), has been called the Aldo Bassetti Room since 2023.
My connection with him has been fluctuating. Sometimes very cordial, sometimes difficult, because of our respective characters.
Aldo was not only my mother’s companion and then husband until her death, but, for me, first and foremost, ‘supplier’ to Esselunga, with beer: his father Gianni was a producer and he followed in his father’s footsteps.
Before I came along, the relationship with Poretti and Carlsberg Italia, then – companies in which he was a shareholder and manager – was managed by Ferdinando Schiavoni because my father didn’t want to know [to have anything to do with him].
He has been my interlocutor in several of my professional experiences, from when I was learning the retail trade in Chicago in 1989, at Dominick’s (Aldo was there at that time, and had the opportunity to meet me and listen to my observations), to the memory of a debate I had in front of the entire board of directors of Centromarca, the association adhering to Confindustria that brings together the producers of branded consumer goods, towards the end of the 1990s, when I was Commercial Director of Esselunga and Aldo was a councillor of Centromarca in his capacity as President of the Carlsberg Italia industry but also as President of United Breweries of Europe (Association of European Brewers). Aldo remembered that meeting well, and the very positive impression I left, which he wrote to me about in a letter that I still keep.
Then, after I left Esselunga, we had further working relations, not least because he was a councillor of the Guido Venosta Foundation, which I started chairing in 2020.
With his death, another era of my life sadly closed.
Bibliography:
D.D.V., ‘Put a Leopard in Mantua’, newspaper article in Albiate, Villa San Valerio, Villa San Valerio Archives, Giorgina Venosta Archives.
Brera Pinacoteca, In memory of Aldo Bassetti, 10/12/2022.
[Redazione Milano] Aldo Bassetti died at 96: the entrepreneur in love with art and ‘friend of Brera’, in La Repubblica, 10 December 2022.
[Redazione] Farewell to Aldo Bassetti, enlightened entrepreneur between art and design, “Il Sole 24 Ore”, 10 December 2022.
P.L. PANZA, Milano, addio ad Aldo Bassetti, “amico di Brera” e imprenditore illuminato, “Corriere della Sera”, 10 December 2022.
A. FIORI, Ceremony for the naming of the Aldo Bassetti Room at the Brera Art Gallery, press release, 11 October 2023.
