At the Swiss boarding school where they send me in the mid-1970s I like to study, but ‘discipline is not my forte. (…) In the end I was expelled (…) My father threatened to send me to the Morosini naval boarding school in Venice, or to the dreaded Institut auf dem Rosenberg in St. Gallen, where if one makes a mistake ‘the punishments are harsh’, he assures me. It is the same boarding school where my uncle Claudio Caprotti was also sent as a boy, and before him my grandfather Peppino [Giuseppe Caprotti], when he was just 10 years old.” (CAPROTTI, The Bones, p. 101).
The boarding school was founded in 1889 in St Gallen, Switzerland, by Elrich Schmidt, and was known as Institut Dr. Schmidt until the 1930s, when the founder died. The young Giuseppe (last on the right in the photo in typical costume) studied there from 1909 to 1911 (see R. ROMANO, The Caprotti family, p. 254, no. 78).
The archive contains other very beautiful photographs of the Institut Dr. Schmidt and his students.
