Grandfather Guido was born on 3 October 1911 in Milan, to Giuseppe, who ‘had graduated with honours from the Milan Polytechnic from where he left to begin the great adventure of tyres in Italy at Pirelli’ (he would eventually become one of its general managers), and Argia Neri. For him, a child who lived on Via Vittor Pisani, then very close to the ‘Brusada’, the old Pirelli factory, there was nothing “of the great world ‘outside’: there was only Pirelli with the elongated ‘P’ and, indirectly, FIAT, which needed tyres to run in the streets.” (Venosta, Memorie, p. 2).
His first school, as for his two brothers, Ferruccio and Giorgio, was the Vittoria Colonna Institute, in Via Conservatorio. He attended middle school, then divided into lower gymnasium (junior high school) and upper gymnasium (senior high school) at the renowned Parini classical high school, then housed in the premises of Collegio Longone, now the headquarters of the Police Headquarters in via Senato.
Little Guido played football passionately on the lawns of Piazza Caiazzo. On those lawns he often met real players, some of whom worked at Pirelli, and all of whom played for the still young Milan, whose founders, in 1899, included one of the two Pirelli brothers, Piero, who was not only a player himself, but in 1909 took over as president, leading the club for 28 years. It was also Piero who gave his team – and the city – a real stadium, the San Siro, inaugurated in 1926.
Sometimes, on the pitch in Piazza Caiazzo, his great-grandfather Giuseppe would also be on the pitch, ‘being ‘heavy’ and impetuous, he was much feared by us little strikers. (…)”. (Ibid., p. 11).
Football, Milan as an ancient family sporting faith: I too, like my grandfather Guido, happened to know my childhood football idols who played for their favourite team. The historical ebb and flow of my life: Leopoldo Pirelli, Piero’s son, was until his death the companion of Rosellina Archinto, a woman of great value and one of the ‘grand dames’ of Italian publishing, whom I knew well because she was a great friend of my mother Giorgina; it was she, as a Milan city councillor, who celebrated my marriage to Laura in 1992.
Sources:
Albiate, Villa San Valerio Archives, Guido Venosta, G. VENOSTA, unpublished memoirs (1996-97).
Piero Pirelli, entry on https://www.magliarossonera.it/protagonisti/PRES/Pres-PirelliI.html
