Uncle Beppo Venosta: an original and unconventional personality

Original and revolutionary Uncle Beppo, my mother Giorgina's brother, was an original and revolutionary type, a great Carlo Marx-like beard and an active participant in Sixty-Eight and the '68ism' that followed. A journalist of great class, foreign correspondent from the Middle East for many years, an ironic and provocative person, he died of cancer, the disease that his father, grandfather Guido Venosta, had fought so long and so effectively with AIRC. Grandfather fortunately did not have to see him, having died the year before.

The Albiate bridge and Mayor Peppino Caprotti

In the early 1950s, the 19th-century bridge in Albiate, built at the time of carts and wagons, was now inadequate for modern vehicle traffic and too low to withstand the flooding of the Lambro. The municipal council led by Peppino Caprotti, my grandfather, who was elected mayor in the summer of 1951, began to deal with it, because in that very year the Lambro was still overflowing. During his brief period at the head of the Albiatese municipal administration (he died in a car accident the following year), Peppino had time to lay the foundations for the important project to rebuild the bridge.

Peppino Caprotti, Alberto Sartoris and the school and family chapel projects in Albiate

After the First World War, Albiate underwent a phase of great transformation and in 1929 inaugurated the new town hall, destined to serve as town hall, school and clinic, also as a memorial to the 60 fallen and missing in the town. The building was realised thanks to a collective subscription and the contribution of several benefactor families, including the Caprotti family. In the archives of Villa San Valerio emerges the correspondence between my grandfather Peppino Caprotti and the architect Alberto Sartoris, who was commissioned to design both the building and the family chapel in the Albiate cemetery.

Giuseppe Caprotti: ‘From trolleys to history, the luck of living more lives’

What will we read about in your new book? ‘I tell another side of the family through two extraordinary explorers: my eponymous ancestor Giuseppe Caprotti, who lived thirty years in Yemen, and my great uncle Gianni Albertini, a skier and mountaineer who explored the North Pole’.