‘The affluence in which the family lived and the acquaintances (…) were slowly shifting its centre of gravity towards Milan. His grandfather had taken a house in Viale Tunisia and bought a building in the very central Via del Lauro. To make the purchase he had given power of attorney to a friend, Nando Angeloni, who handled all the family’s bureaucratic and economic matters but, above all, he had an almost brotherly bond with Peppino. He had introduced his grandfather to the city’s most prominent families, the Falck and Pirelli families, and had got him into one of Milan’s most exclusive clubs, the Clubino, frequented by the great industrialists. Beyond these conveniences, however, Angeloni remained a companion of adventures: someone still remembers a large party organised in Albiate in honour of a company of American heiresses, whom Nando met on a boat trip back from New York.” (p. 41).
Nando Angeloni was, indirectly, at the origin of our family’s fortune as it was he who suggested to grandfather Peppino to buy Pirelli’s shares, the proceeds of which would allow The Caprotti family to participate in the foundation of Esselunga (p.73).
It was he who took care of the very delicate matter of announcing Peppino’s death, which occurred next to Anna Z., to my grandmother Marianne Maire in Caprotti.
Some time later, in the furious struggle that pitted him against the other members of the family, Bernardo would go so far as to accuse his mother of having conceived his favourite last-born son Claudio not with his consort Peppino, but with Nando Angeloni, who had done so much for the whole family. Angeloni, as well as rejecting the accusations, proves that the year of Claudio’s birth he was in the United States, and obtains a formal apology from Bernardo. ‘At home we remember well what, in Bernardo, had triggered the demon of doubt in his mother. Everything is explained by the fact that our cousin Andrea, Claudio’s second son, was born with red hair, which nobody in the family had. Bernardo assumes that there is something wrong. And he takes the pretext to attack his mother and indirectly his brother Claudio. Until Marina is born in 1978 and, surprisingly, she too has red hair. At that point Bernardo will never speak of this episode again [which will only be fully clarified after the publication of my book ]. It is interesting to note that Violetta, as an infant, had red hair. The ‘redhead’ genes came from the Caprotti family, strange that Dad hadn’t noticed.” (pp. 117-119).
Nando Angeloni, born in 1910, passed away in 2004 at the Policlinico di Milano. A graduate in Economics, he had worked for CGE (General Electric) for which he had also spent a period in the United States. Once back in Italy, he had founded an AEG subsidiary, Comar, which he then sold back to the German company of origin. He was for a long time a director of Manifattura Caprotti.
