Camillo Olivetti - electrical engineer

Founder of Italy’s first typewriter factory

Camillo Olivetti in 1930, at around the
time he handed the reins to son Adriano

The electrical engineer Camillo Olivetti, who opened Italy’s first typewriter factory and founded a company that would become a major player in electronic business technology, was born on this day in 1868 in Ivrea in Piedmont.

The Olivetti company that later produced Italy’s first electronic computer was developed by Adriano Olivetti, the oldest of Camillo's five children, but it was his father’s vision and enterprise that laid the foundations for the brand’s success and established the Olivetti name.

Camillo came from a Jewish middle-class background. His father, Salvador Benedetto, was a successful merchant. His mother, Elvira, came from a banking family in Modena but her interests were more cultural. She was fluent in four languages.

Elvira had full care of Camillo after Salvador died when the boy was only one and sent him to boarding school in Milan at a young age.  Although his mother’s fluency in four languages was a help - he learned English early in his life - she understood his inclination to work in electronics.

After graduating from the Royal Italian Industrial Museum (later the Polytechnic of Turin) with a diploma in industrial engineering, Camillo broadened his knowledge by travelling. He spent more than a year in London working in an industry that produced electrical instrumentation and later went to the United States with his former university professor, Galileo Ferraris, who in Chicago in 1893 introduced him to his hero, Thomas Edison.

The first Olivetti typewriter, the M1, which Camillo
designed himself for production at the Ivrea factory

Olivetti remained in the United States after Ferraris returned to Italy, taking up a position as electrotechnical assistant at Stanford University. 

Back in Italy in 1894, he teamed up with a couple of old college friends in his first business venture, importing typewriters, before deciding to go into production with a factory making electrical measuring instruments, entering into partnership with a number of investors.

The business grew, moving to factories in Milan and then Monza to enable increased production, but Olivetti had disagreements with his investors over how much of their budget should be spent on research, so the venture ended.

Taking 40 workers with him, he then moved back to Ivrea and, in 1908, opened the first dedicated Olivetti typewriter factory, a distinctive building in local Canavese red brick.

The original red brick factory was retained when Olivetti
built new modern premises in Via Jervis in Ivrea

The first typewriter produced - from 1911 onwards - was the M1, which Olivetti designed himself based on the knowledge he had acquired in the United States.

At first, production was on a relatively small scale - about 1,000 machines per year - and the business began to grow exponentially only after the First World War, when Olivetti shrewdly diversified into aircraft parts, which were technologically advanced and therefore in constant demand.

When life returned to normal after the war, Olivetti was well placed to expand and developed a much improved typewriter, the M20.  His business model, visionary at the time, included setting up Olivetti branches in Milan and then other Italian cities - and eventually abroad - to provide assistance to customers at local level.

Throughout much of his life, Camillo Olivetti was active politically. As a young man, a socialist by inclination, he was appalled by the what he saw as contempt for working people by the ruling classes and travelled to Milan in 1898 to take part in the so-called bread riots, when soldiers opened fire on protesters, resulting in 500 deaths. Angered by what he had seen, he considered raising his own armed force with the intention of stirring up revolution.

Adriano Olivetti shared his father's vision and concerns
for the workforce and the local community

He was dissuaded from such drastic action but spent much of his life campaigning, mainly through newspaper columns, on the side of the working man.  When the Fascists rose to power, he became an outspoken critic of Mussolini’s regime, taking part in a protest in Ivrea in 1924 following the murder of the socialist politician Giacomo Matteotti.

He scaled down his activities only when he began to fear Fascist reprisals against his factory in Ivrea. At one stage, after Mussolini introduced his race laws, Camillo had his family flee the country for their own safety.

Although he was a businessman foremost, he recognised the need for good relationships between employers and workers and supported the establishment of trade unions.

Olivetti would become a famous name worldwide, well-known for its technical excellence and modern designs as Camillo and later Adriano employed many famous designers and architects to work on their products and publicity campaigns, including Ignazio Gardella and Marco Zanuso.

But the company would also be admired for consistent social welfare policies. When Adriano became chairman of the company in 1938, he increases production to around 15,000 machines per year but at the same time, as the town’s biggest employer, instigated projects that would change the face of Ivrea, building schools, houses, roads and recreational facilities.

Camillo died at the age of 75 in 1943, having moved to Biella, not far from the border with Switzerland, in the 1930s because of the anti-Jewish political climate further south.

Ivrea's cathedral, with its neoclassical facade

Travel tip:

Ivrea, where Camillo Olivetti was born and established his business, is a town in the Piedmont region of northern Italy, about 50km (31 miles) north of Turin. It has a 14th century castle and the ruins of a 1st century Roman theatre that would have been able to hold 10,000 spectators. The town’s cathedral, which originated from a church built on the same site in 4th century, itself at the site of a pagan temple, was reconstructed in around 1000 AD in Romanesque style and, in 1785, rebuilt again in a Baroque style. The current neoclassical façade was added in the 19th century. Ivrea hosts an annual carnival before Easter, which includes the Battle of the Oranges, where teams of locals on foot throw oranges at teams riding in carts.

The Palazzo Cisterna in Biella

Travel tip:

Biella, which sits in the foothill of the Alps, is about 85km (53 miles) northeast of Turin and slightly more than 100km (62 miles) west of Milan. It is surrounded by beautiful mountains and divided into two districts - Biella-Piano and Biella-Piazzo, which are connected to each other by steep streets and a funicular railway. Biella-Piazzo, the Medieval district, is dominated by the magnificent Palazzo Cisterna. Biella-Piano is the home of the Duomo, the pre-Romanesque Baptistery and a museum of Biellese history.

More reading:

Ignazio Gardella - the modern designer with an eye for the classical

Marco Zanuso, architect and designer who put Italy at the forefront of contemporary design

How Karl Zuegg turned the family farm into an international company

Also on this day:

1819: The birth of Risorgimento activist Aurelio Saffi

1912: The birth of award-winning microbiologist Salvador Luria

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Domenico Ghirardelli – chocolatier

Built famous US business with skills learned in Genoa

The chocolatier Domenico Ghirardelli, founder of the Ghirardelli Chocolate Company in San Francisco, was born on this day in 1817 in a village just outside Rapallo in Liguria.

The Ghirardelli Chocolate Shop in Ghirardelli Square
on San Francisco's northern waterfront

Also known as Domingo, Ghirardelli arrived in San Francisco in 1849 during the rapid expansion years of the Gold Rush, having spent the previous 10 years or so in Peru, where he had run a successful confectionery business.

After making money as a merchant, initially ferrying supplies to prospectors in the gold fields, he set up his first chocolate factory in 1852, drawing on the skills he acquired as an apprentice in Genoa.

By the end of the century, the Ghirardelli Chocolate Company was one of the city’s most successful businesses, with a prestige headquarters on North Point Street, a short distance from Fisherman’s Wharf, in a group of buildings that became known as Ghirardelli Square.

The son of a spice importer, Ghirardelli was born in the village of Santa Anna, just outside Rapallo, about 25km (16 miles) along the Ligurian coast from Genoa, in the direction of La Spezia to the southeast.

His father wanted him to have a trade and once he had reached his teens sent him to be an apprentice at Romanengo’s, an important confectioner in Genoa, with a view to setting himself up in business.

Domenico Ghirardelli arrived in San
Francisco from Peru in 1849

However, having been forced to give up its status as an independent republic and become part of the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia as part of the settlement following the Napoleonic Wars, Genoa was a volatile city prone to riots and to brutal repression by the military and in 1837 Ghirardelli decided, in common with many Italians, to leave in search of a better life in the New World.

At the age of only 20 and newly married, he arrived first in Montevideo in Uruguay, moving on a year later to Lima in Peru, a prosperous city where there was already an established Italian community.

He set up a confectionery shop on Calle de los Mercaderes, the city’s main shopping street, which he modelled on Romanengo’s store in Genoa.  After the death of his wife, he married for a second time, to a Peruvian widow, and would have stayed in Lima had his former neighbour, an American from Pennsylvania who had moved to San Francisco, not written to him urging him to follow.

The neighbour, James Lick, who would go on to become the richest man in California, had set himself up on the proceeds of 600lb (272kg) of chocolate Ghirardelli had given him to sell. With San Francisco on the brink of an economic boom after the discovery of gold in 1848, it was too good an opportunity to miss.

Trading first in general merchandise, Ghirardelli rapidly expanded from running a delivery service to owning grocery stores in San Francisco and Stockton, plus a soda fountain, a coffee house and a part-interest in a hotel.  Within two years, he had amassed wealth of $25,000, which then had the buying power of around $750,000 (€610,000) today.

The Ghirardelli factory was established just back from
the San Francisco waterfront

He opened his first chocolate factory in 1852 in the Verandah Building on Portsmouth Square, living above the premises, before moving to Jackson Street, building a separate family home in Oakland.  The business grew even more after the accidental discovery of cocoa powder, the result of some bags of chocolate paste being left unattended in a warm room.

The butterfat in the paste melted, dripping out on to the floor, leaving behind in the bags a greaseless residue that could be ground into a powder, which Ghirardelli patented and sold under the name of Broma, to be used as a cake ingredient or for making a hot cocoa drink.

The recession of the 1870s brought a massive scaling back, with many of the company’s assets, including the house in Oakland and several stores, being auctioned off to keep the factory going.

Yet, despite competition from others keen to exploit chocolate’s continuing popularity, the business recovered, with Ghirardelli’s sons increasingly involved.  Broma, rebranded as Ghirardelli’s Chocolate Powder, continued to be a big seller.  By the late 1880s, the company was producing and selling one million pounds (453,000kg) of the powder each year.

Ghirardelli retired in 1889, handing control to his sons.  In 1892, needing to expand, the company acquired a large woollen mill near the city’s northern waterfront at what his now Ghirardelli Square.

He died in 1894, contracting influenza during an extended visit to Rapallo, where he had gone in order to rediscover his roots. His body was returned to San Francisco, to be buried in the family mausoleum in Oakland’s Mountain View Cemetery.

Production continued at Ghirardelli Square until the 1960s, when the business was sold and the manufacturing operation moved to San Leandro.  Today, while still trading under the family name as the third oldest chocolate manufacturer in the United States, the business is a subsidiary of the Swiss company, Lindt and Sprüngli. There is still a Ghirardelli shop in the Ghirardelli Square shopping and restaurant complex

A quaint 16th century castle guards Rapallo's harbour

Travel tip:

Rapallo, larger and a little cheaper than its exclusive neighbour Portofino, is an attractive seaside town of the eastern Italian Riviera, known as the Riviera di Levante. The town developed around a harbour guarded by a small castle – Il Castello sul Mare – built in 1551, which sits right on the water’s edge.  Behind the harbour is a network of narrow streets. There are boat service to Portofino, as well as Santa Margherita Ligure and Camogli, while the main Genoa to Pisa railway line passes through the town.

The ornate interior of the Romanengo store in Genoa

Travel tip:

Romanengo’s confectionery store in Via Soziglia in Genoa has become a tourist attraction in itself, a wonderfully ornate emporium barely changed since it was refurbished lavishly in the mid-19^th century, having opened for business for the first time in 1814.  Modelled on Parisian confectioners’ shops, it has a marble floor, a frescoed ceiling, elegant chandeliers and beautiful inlaid rosewood shelving and counters, with endless dishes of brightly coloured confectionery in glass cases. The company logo of a dove carrying an olive branch symbolised peace at the end of the Napoleonic Wars.


More reading:

Michele Ferrero - the man who invented Nutella

Humble beginnings of chocolate giant Ferrero

The entrepreneur behind Perugina chocolates

Also on this day:

1513: Death of Pope Julius II

1609: The birth of military leader Raimondo Montecuccoli

1868: Death of painter and revolutionary Giuseppe Abbati

(Picture credits: Ghirardelli store by PictorialEvidence; San Francisco waterfront by Saopaulo1; Rapallo Castle by RegentsPark; all via Wikimedia Commons; Romanengo store from www.romanengo.com) 

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ENI – oil and gas multinational

Italian energy company 65 years old today

The ENI logo, with its strange
six-legged dog

The Rome-based multinational oil and gas company ENI, one of the world’s largest industrial concerns, was founded on this day in 1953.

The company, which operates in 79 countries, is currently valued at $52.2 billion (€47.6 billion) and employs almost 34,000 people.  It is the 11^th largest oil company in the world.

Its operations include exploration for and production of oil and natural gas, the processing, transportation and refining of crude oil, the transportation of natural gas, the storage and distribution of petroleum products and the production of base chemicals and plastics.

A wholly state-owned company until 1995, ENI is still to a large extent in the control of the Italian government, which owns just over 30 per cent of the company as a golden share, which includes preferential voting rights, almost four per cent through the state treasury, and a further 26 per cent through the Italian investment bank, Cassa Depositi e Prestiti.

ENI came into being as Italy was rebuilding after the Second World War, which had left its economy in ruins. Enrico Mattei, an industrialist and a Christian Democrat deputy, was assigned the task of winding down the existing state-owned oil company Agip (Azienda Generale Italiana Petrolio), an entity that had come into being under the Fascist regime and was seen as unsustainable.

Enrico Mattei, ENI's founder, was a
Christian Democrat deputy

Instead of closing Agip, however, Mattei rebuilt and expanded it, setting up a new company, Ente Nationale Idrocarburi – the National Hydrocarbons Authority – which would control the petrochemical industry throughout Italy.

The famous ENI logo – a six-legged imaginary dog – came into being at an early stage, the six legs symbolising the four wheels of a car and the two legs of the driver.

Mattei’s tactics were controversial.  Attempting to break the dominance of the world oil market by the so-called “Seven Sisters” – the seven mainly American companies that controlled 85 per cent of the global market from the mid-40s onwards, he made independent deals with Algeria, Egypt and Iran and, at the height of the Cold War, with the Soviet Union that greatly enhanced ENI’s value.

When Mattei was killed in a plane crash in 1962, there was strong evidence that the private jet in which he and the Time-Life journalist William McHale were travelling from Catania in Sicily to Milan had been sabotaged and conspiracy theories about the involvement of Italian and American secret service agents acting in the interests of the “Seven Sisters” rumbled on for years. After several enquiries, a court ruled in 1995 that Mattei’s cause of death was homicide, although the perpetrators have never been identified.

Even after Mattei’s death, however, ENI’s ties with the Middle East and Algeria were further strengthened, especially after the crisis of 1973, when the OPEC countries imposed an embargo on US and Netherlands companies in the wake of the Yom Kippur War.

Emma Marcegaglia, ENI's
current president

The ENI enterprises included an oil pipeline between Algeria and Sicily, via Tunisia, and, more recently, a joint initiative with Russia to import gas supplies into Europe.

Within Italy, ENI sells petrol and diesel under the ENI and Agip brands, and has seven power plants run using natural gas, at Brindisi in Apulia, Ferrara and Ravenna in Emilia-Romagna, Livorno in Tuscany and Bolgiano, Mantua and Ferrera Erbognone in Lombardy.

These supply power to 7.45 million residential customers in Italy and 2.09 million in other parts of Europe.

The ENI group includes companies in the construction, engineering and drilling businesses, with much energy devoted to finding new reserves off oil and gas, particularly off the coast of Africa and in the southern Mediterranean.

The company is chaired by the 52-year-old businesswoman Emma Marcegaglia, who was appointed president by Italian premier Matteo Renzi. The CEO is Claudio Descalzi, who first worked for ENI in 1981.

The Duomo at Brindisi, rebuilt after 1743 earthquake

Travel tip:

The port of Brindisi, where the power plant is part of substantial ENI involvement in the area’s industry, sits on a large natural harbour overseen by the red-stone Aragonese Castle known as Forte a Mare that stands on a small island at the entrance, and by the Castello Grande or Castello Federiciano, which was once a residence of King Victor Emmanuel III.  Within the medieval centre of the city, which boasts a reconstructed Romanesque Duomo – the 11^th or 12^th century original was destroyed in an earthquake in 1743, two ancient Roman columns, which has been adopted as symbols of the city, are said to mark the beginning of the Appian Way, which linked Brindisi with Rome.

Search Booking.com for hotels in Brindisi

ENI's headquarters in the EUR district of Rome

Travel tip:

ENI’s headquarters in Rome, the Palazzo ENI or Palazzo di vetro (The Glass Palace) is situated in the area known as Parco Centrale del Lago, a large green space in the middle of the EUR district, the modern city within a city built for the Universal Exposition that was scheduled to be held in Rome in 1942 but never took place. The Palazzo looks out over the Lago dell’EUR – the EUR lake – a short distance from the Palazzo dello Sport, the circular arena built by Marcello Piacentini and Pier Luigi Nervi for the 1960 Olympics.   Designed by the architects Marco Bacigalupo and Ugo Ratti, assisted by engineers Leo Finzi and Edoardo Nova, it is 85.5m high and has 22 floors. When it was inaugurated, it was the tallest building in the capital, after the Basilica of San Pietro in Vaticano, but has since been eclipsed by nearby Torre Europarco (120m) and the Eurosky Tower (155m).

Find accommodation in Rome with Booking.com 

More reading:

Why mystery surrounds the death of industrialist Enrico Mattei

Calisto Tanzi and the Parmalat scandal

The textile boss who built a village for his workforce

Also on this day:

1482: The death of sculptor Luca della Robbia

1791: The birth of painter Francesco Hayez

1821: The birth of painter Roberto Bompiani

1918: The death of Nobel peace prize winner Ernesto Teodoro Moneta

1944: The birth of author and politician Raffaele Lauro

1966: The birth of footballer Andrea Silenzi

(Picture credits: Brindisi duomo by LPLT; ENI building by Blackcat)

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Enrico Mattei – industrialist and entrepreneur

Death in plane crash remains an unsolved mystery

Enrico Mattei rose to political prominence in the years
after the Second World War

Enrico Mattei, one of the most important figures in Italy’s post-War economic rebirth, was killed on this day in 1962 in a plane crash near the village of Bascapè in Lombardy.

Accompanied by a Time-Life journalist, William McHale, Mattei was returning to Milan from Catania in Sicily in a French-built four-seater Morane-Saulnier jet being flown by Irnerio Bertuzzi, a respected pilot who had flown many daring missions during the Second World War.

They were on their descent towards Milan Linate when the crash happened, less than 17km (10.5 miles) from the airport.

Mattei, a politically powerful industrialist, best known for turning round Italy’s seemingly unviable oil industry, was not short of enemies and after his death there was considerable speculation that it did not happen by accident.

A government-led investigation, overseen by the then Italian Defence Minister Giulio Andreotti, concluded that a storm was to blame for the crash, even though the pilot was highly experienced and very unlikely to have allowed bad weather to bring him down.

Questions about the initial inquiry’s findings led to a second inquiry was opened in 1966 but shelved without reaching a conclusion.

Mattei established ENI as Italy's state oil
company in the early 1950s

In the fevered atmosphere that prevailed in Italy at the time, however, with much social unrest and the Italian Communist Party threatening the grip of the Christian Democrats, the conspiracy theories never went away.

Indeed, there were good grounds to imagine that dark forces might have been involved, given the controversial way in which Mattei had gone about reviving Italy’s ailing oil industry.

Born at Acqualagna in Marche in 1906, Mattei had experience in the tanning and chemical industries in the late 1920s and early 1930s and joined the Fascist Party in 1931, although he was never active politically and was persuaded by the disastrous course of the Second World War to join anti-Fascist groups during the 1940s.

After Mussolini was ousted in 1943, Mattei supplied weapons to the Italian resistance and aligned himself with the newly-formed Christian Democrats, participating in the Northern Italian military command of the National Liberation Committee.

He went on to become a powerful figure within the Christian Democrats, for whom he sat in the Chamber of Deputies between 1948 and 1953.

But it was the decision of the National Liberation Committee, in the immediate aftermath of war, to put him in charge of the Fascist-instigated state-owned oil company, Agip (Azienda Generale Italiana Petrolio), that defined his life.

A Morane-Saulnier MS 760 similar to the one in which
Mattei was travelling when he was killed

Mattei’s brief was to close Agip, which was seen as unsustainable.  Instead, Mattei rebuilt it, exploiting newly-discovered oil and methane sources in the Po Valley, which he used to supply the postwar industrial growth in northern Italy with vital energy supplies.

He ploughed profits back into more exploration and ultimately persuaded the government, despite opposition from within his own party, to set up a new company, called Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi (ENI) with control over the petrochemical industry throughout Italy.

It was as president of ENI that Mattei began to acquire enemies. Keen to develop international operations once it became clear Italy could not be self-sufficient in oil, he persuaded parliament to support a massive expansion of the company, often – it became clear later – using company money to pay sweeteners.

However, in the international field he was up against the might of the cartel he dubbed the Seven Sisters – the seven major companies, mainly American, that controlled 85 per cent of the world’s petroleum reserves and kept prices at a high level.

Mattei's desk is preserved at a small museum dedicated
to his memory in his home town of Acqualanga

Determined to get a better deal for Italy, Mattei began to make arrangements of his own that bypassed the cartel, with the poorer Middle East and north African countries and, most controversially, with Russia. 

This engendered opposition from the United States, who saw the deals he struck with Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt and Iran as severely detrimental to their own interests, and from NATO, who feared that a major trade link between Italy and Russia would only aid the march of communism in Italy, which they were committed to preventing.

Mattei upset the French, too, by secretly funding the independence movement in French colonial Algeria, again to facilitate preferential oil agreements.

Thus the finger of suspicion soon began to point at America and France, in the shape of the CIA, the French secret services and the French far-right paramilitary group, the OAS.

In 1974 there was another inquiry, prompted by the disappearance in Sicily of a journalist, Mauro de Mauro, who was looking into Mattei’s business dealings for a film about him being planned by the director, Francesco Rosi, and the claim by a former agent of the French intelligence agency SDECE, that Mattei had been eliminated by them.

Again, no conclusion was reached but in 1995 a further inquiry was launched, which took into account a claim by the Mafia pentito (supergrass) Tommaso Buscetta that Sicilian Cosa Nostra members had killed Mattei at the request of the American Mafia, but was largely concerned with some wreckage from the plane that had found its way to the officer of the public prosecutor in Pavia, under whose jurisdiction that crash scene fell.

Fragments saved at the scene by an Italian secret service agent had been handed to Mattei’s nephew, Angelo, who in turn gave them to the prosecutor.  This prompted an exhumation of the bodies of Mattei and Bertuzzi, the pilot, and a new post mortem that identified clear indications that an explosion had taken place on the plane while it was still in the air, almost certainly caused by a bomb triggered when the landing gear was activated.

On the basis of this evidence, a judge quashed Andreotti’s original pronouncement that the deaths were caused accidentally and reclassified them as homicide, although the identity of the perpetrators remains an unsolved mystery.

The beautiful Gola di Furlo

Travel tip:

The town of Acqualagna, which is situated about 40km (25 miles) inland of Pesaro to the southwest, is in the valley of the Candigliano river close to where it is joined by the Burano, just upstream from the beautiful Gola di Furlo – the Furlo pass – a gorge formed between two mountain peaks by the force of the Candigliano, along which was built the Roman road Via Flaminia, part of which passes through a tunnel built into the rock by the Romans at the narrowest part of the gorge.  The house in which Mattei was born contains a small museum dedicated to his memory, which can be viewed by appointment.

Milan's Linate airport as it appeared when commercial
operations began in 1930s

Travel tip:

Linate airport, situated less than 10km (6 miles) from Piazza del Duomo, is Milan’s city airport, although it nowadays handles considerably fewer passengers than Malpensa, which is almost 50km (30 miles) out of town, just a few kilometres from Lake Maggiore. Linate began commercial operations in the 1930s when it was built to replace Taliedo airport, just to the south of the city, which had been one of the world’s first aerodromes but was too small for significant commercial traffic.

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Agostino Bassi – biologist

Scientist who rescued the silk industry in Italy

Agostino Bassi had lessons from
Lazzaro Spallanzani

Bacteriologist Agostino Bassi, who was the first to expound the parasitic theory of infection, was born on this day in 1773 at Mairago near Lodi in Lombardy.

He developed his theory by studying silkworms, which helped him discover that many diseases are caused by micro organisms.  This was 10 years in advance of the work of Louis Pasteur.

In 1807 Bassi began an investigation into the silkworm disease mal de segno, also known as muscardine, which was causing serious economic losses in Italy and France.

After 25 years of research and carrying out various experiments, Bassi was able to demonstrate that the disease was contagious and was caused by a microscopic parasitic fungus.

He concluded that the organism, at the time named botrytis paradoxa, but now known as beauvaria bassiana in his honour, was transmitted among the worms by contact and by infected food.

These findings enabled Bassi to rescue the economically important silk industry in Italy by recommending using disinfectants, separating the rows of feeding caterpillars and keeping farms clean.

A plaque outside the house in Paolo Gorini in Lodi, where
Bassi lived and studied, commemorates his life

Bassi announced his discoveries in his work Del mal del segno, calcinaccio o moscarduino, published in 1835.

He also produced scientific works on laboratory cultures of potatoes, on cheese and wine making, as well as the human diseases of leprosy and cholera, after which he made the important generalisation that many diseases of plants, animals and man are caused by animal or vegetable parasites.

Bassi preceded both Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch in formulating a germ theory of disease. He prescribed methods for the prevention and elimination of muscardine, which earned him a lot of prestige.

His father, a wealthy farmer, had wanted Bassi him to look after the family property when he grew up, rather than become a biologist. But he was able to take science lessons from the biologist, Lazzaro Spallanzani, who was one of his relatives.

Louis Pasteur is reputed to have had the portraits of both Spallanzani and Bassi on the walls of his office.

After Bassi’s death in 1856 in Lodi, when the biologist was 82, he was buried in the Romanesque church of San Francesco in his home town.

In 1953 the Italian post office issued a stamp on the 180th anniversary of his birth in 1773, featuring a portrait of Bassi bordered by pictures of silkmoths.

Via Agostino Bassi is the main street in Mairago,
where the biologist was born

Travel tip:

The comune of Mairago, where Bassi was born, is in the province of Lodi about 40km (25 miles) south east of Milan and about 7km (4 miles) southeast of Lodi. Mairago is surrounded by fields of corn and barley and there is widespread beekeeping in the area.

Agostini Bassi's tomb in the church of San Francesco

Travel tip:

Agostino Bassi’s tomb is in the 13th century church of San Francesco in Piazza Ospedale in Lodi, set against a wall in the right transept. The church is distinctive because of its two ‘open sky’ double mullioned windows in the façade, an early example of a design that was often repeated in northern Italy during the 14th and 15th centuries.

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Pietro Ferrero - baker and chocolatier

Humble beginnings of €20 billion company

Pietro Ferrero

Pietro Ferrero, the founder of the Ferrero chocolate and confectionery company, was born in Farigliano, a small town in Piedmont, on this day in 1898.

A baker by profession, he moved to nearby Alba in 1926 with his wife and young son, Michele, before deciding to try his luck in Turin, where in 1940 he opened a large pastry shop in Via Sant’Anselmo.

Trading conditions were tough, however, and the business was not a success.  The family returned to Alba in 1942, setting up a smaller bakery in Via Rattazzi, at the back of which Pietro created a kind of confectionery laboratory.

He had hit upon the idea of trying to find alternative materials from which to make products, largely because the high taxes on cocoa beans meant conventional chocolate-based pastries were expensive to make.

Hazelnuts, on the other hand, were plentiful, Piedmont being one of Italy’s major producers. One of his experiments involved combining Gianduja, a traditional Piedmontese hazelnut paste, with about 20 per cent chocolate. 

Pietro's original Giandujot
hazelnut 'chocolate' bars

Convinced his customers would like the taste, he began manufacturing bars of his chocolate-substitute on site at the bakery, selling it wrapped in foil under the name Pasta Gianduja and then Giandujot. It was popular as a sweet snack, often served in thin slices on bread.

Demand for the product increased rapidly, so much so that producing it by hand became impracticable. Together with his wife, Piera, Pietro founded the company Ferrero on May 14, 1946, built a factory in Alba on Via Vivaro and began to hire new workers.

Sadly, Pietro died in 1949 at the age of just 50, not realising his company would grow in quite the way it did.

Sales soared after a creamy, spreadable version of Gianduja was produced in 1951 under the name Supercrema. This was the forerunner of Nutella, the chocolate-hazelnut spread invented by Pietro’s son, Michele, who inherited the business and turned it into one of the world’s biggest brands.

Under Michele’s astute management, the company expanded to produce a whole range of confectionary products, including Ferrero Rocher praline chocolates, the Kinder range of eggs and bars, Mon Cheri cherry liqueur chocolates and the espresso-filled Pocket Coffee chocolates.

Ferrero SpA produces 365,000
 tons of Nutella each year

Today Ferrero sells more than 365,000 tons of Nutella every year, has 11 factories around the world, employs more than 33,000 people and the company is valued at around €20 billion ($23.72 billion).  Incredibly, the company uses 25 per cent of the entire global hazelnut crop n producing Nutella.

When he died in 2015, Michele Ferrero was the richest man in Italy according to the Bloomberg Billionaires index and the 20^th richest person in the world, with a personal fortune of almost €15 billion.

Although it has offices in Luxembourg, Ferrero SpA remains a private company based in Alba and still, essentially, a family business.  Pietro’s grandson, Giovanni – son of Michele – is the current executive chairman.

The appointment earlier this year as chief executive of Lapo Civiletti, the company’s former head of operations in central and eastern Europe, was the first time a non-family member had filled such a high-ranking position in the company.

Alba's San Lorenzo cathedral

Travel tip:

Apart from Ferrero, the town of Alba – about 32km (20 miles) northeast of Farigliano and 60km (37 miles) southeast of Turin – is important for its production of truffles, peaches and wine.  The wines produced locally include Barolo, Barbaresco, Barbera, Nebbiolo and Moscato. The town has a population of almost 32,000 and its historic centre, built on the site of the Roman city of Alba Pompeia, includes the Romanesque cathedral of San Lorenzo and the Gothic church of San Domenico.

Via Roma is one of Turin's main shopping streets

Travel tip:

Via Sant’Anselmo, where Pietro Ferrero ran a pastry shop before moving to Alba, is one of the streets parallel with Turin railway station, south of Corso Vittorio Emanuele II. The city’s main shopping area is on the north side of Corso Vittorio Emanuele, around Via Roma, Via Giuseppe Luigi Lagrange and Via Carlo Alberto. Turin also has 19km (11 miles) of covered arcades and hosts more than 60 markets, including the largest open market in Europe at Porta Palazzo in Piazza della Repubblica.

More reading:

Michele Ferrero - the man who invented Nutella

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Giuseppe ‘Nuccio’ Bertone – car designer

The man behind the classic Alfa Romeo Giulietta Sprint

Nuccio Bertone (right), pictured with his
 father, Giovanni

Automobile designer Giuseppe Bertone, who built car bodies for Alfa Romeo, Fiat, Lamborghini, Ferrari and many other important names in the car industry, was born on this day in 1914 in Turin.

Nicknamed ‘Nuccio’ Bertone, he was regarded as the godfather of Italian car design. His career in the automobile industry spanned six decades.

His father Giovanni was a skilled metalworker who made body parts for cars in a workshop he founded two years before Giuseppe was born.

Giovanni had been born in 1884 into a poor farming family near the town of Mondovi, in southern Piedmont. He had moved to Turin in 1907 and became gripped by the automobile fever that swept the city.

It was under the direction of his son that the company – Carrozzeria Bertone – was transformed after the Second World War into an industrial enterprise, specialising at first in design but later in the manufacture of car bodies on a large scale.

An accountant by qualification, Nuccio joined his father's firm in 1933, although his passion at first was racing cars as a driver. He raced Fiats, OSCAs, Maseratis, and Ferraris.

Through the 1930s, much of the work done by Carrozzeria Bertone was still craft-based and the car bodies finished by hand, but Nuccio understood the need to turn to mass production if the company was to enjoy real success.

Bertone's Alfa Romeo Giulietta Sprint 

After he took control in the 1950s, his first designs were for the British company M.G., but his big break came in 1954, when he landed a contract to design and build 500 Alfa Romeo Giulietta Sprints. They were to be given away in a state raffle but generated such interest that, in the end, Bertone built more than 40,000, transforming the company from a small craft organisation into an industrial one.

He went on to produce numerous models for Fiat and Alfa Romeo and for Lamborghini, which were noted for their beautiful design and strong performance.

Bertone’s revolutionary Lamborghini Miura, unveiled at the 1966 Geneva Auto Show, had a centrally placed engine and a shark-like nose that became a common basic feature in many later designs. The Lamborghini Espada and the Countach, and the Fiat X 1/9, were characterised by sleek lines and grills that create an aura of menace. Bertone’s Ferrari Dino 308 GT4 is another sought out by collectors.

In 1971, Bertone received the Italian equivalent of a knighthood for his services to industry. The 1970s and '80s saw the company’s fortunes dip, but it bounced back by creating convertibles from family cars such as the Vauxhall and Opel Astras and Fiat Punto.

Bertone's revolutionary Lamborghini Miura

When Volvo launched a special series of limited-production two-door sports cars in the United States in 1991, they not only featured bodies designed and built by Bertone, they also bore his signature on a plaque on the dashboard.

Bertone, an avid sailor and skier, had a penchant for sharp tailoring and sunglasses. He was inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame in 2006, nine years after his death in Turin at the age of 82.

In the years after his death, Bertone’s company ran into financial difficulties, eventually declaring bankruptcy in 2014. The name lives on after the licence was bought by a Milan company, Bertone Design, that designs trains, including the high-speed Frecciarossa 1000.

The Civic Tower in the centre of Grugliasco

Travel tip:

Grugliasco, where the Bertone Group was based before its collapse, is a town of some 38,000 residents in the metropolitan area of Turin about 9km (6 miles) west of the centre. The history of the town goes back to the 11^th century at least. The centre is dominated by the Civic Tower, originally built to aid the defence of the town, in time it became the bell tower for the adjoining church of San Cassiano.  The town’s patron saint is San Rocco, credited with delivering the population from an outbreak of plague in 1599. In more recent times, the town was victim to a massacre carried out by German soldiers, who killed up to 66 partisans and citizens in April 1945 in retaliation for a partisan attack on a Fascist division the previous day.

Travel tip:

Examples of Bertone’s designs can be viewed in the Centro Stile Bertone museum in Via Roma, Caprie, a small town about 35km (22 miles) west of Turin along Val di Susa, which was established by Nuccio’s widow, Lilli, who rescued most of the Bertone Collection when the Grugliasco plant was sold. It is now protected by the Ministry of Heritage and Culture as part of Italy’s artistic heritage. Viewing is by appointment (Tel: +39 011 9638 322).

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Ottavio Missoni - fashion designer

Former prisoner of war was also an Olympic hurdler

The fashion designer Ottavio Missoni with his wife Rosita on
the lawn of their mansion in Sumirago in 1975

The fashion designer Ottavio Missoni died on this day in 2013 at the age of 92 following an extraordinary life.

He passed away at his home in Sumirago, 55km (34 miles) north-west of Milan, having requested his release from hospital in order to spend his last days with his family.

Missoni was the co-founder of the Italian fashion brand Missoni, which he set up in 1953 with his wife, Rosita. The company became known around the world for its brightly coloured geometric knits and zigzag patterns and were among the pioneers of Italian ready-to-wear clothing lines.

Earlier, he had been an infantryman during the Second World War, fighting at the Battle of El Alamein in 1942. He was captured by the 7^th Armoured Division of the British Army, popularly known as the Desert Rats, and spent the remainder of the war in an English prisoner-of-war camp in Egypt.

After the war, he pursued his passion for competitive athletics, becoming good enough to be selected in the Italian team for the 1948 Olympics in London, where he reached the final of the 400m hurdles event.

Missoni was born in Dubrovnik, on the Dalmatian coast, in 1921. His mother was a countess, his father, Vittorio, a Friulian sea captain who had moved to Dalmatia while it was under Austrian rule. He grew up in Zadar, now part of Croatia but then called Zara and part of Italian territory, before going to college in Trieste and Milan.

The Missoni logo

He had participated in athletics events before the war. A member of the Italian national team at 16, he took part in an international meeting in Milan in 1937 in which he won the 400m in a time of 48.8 second, which remains the fastest for his age in Italian track history. In 1939, over the same distance, he won a gold medal at the International University Games in Vienna.

Sport provided his entry into the fashion business. Back home after the war, Missoni and his fellow athlete Giorgio Oberweger opened a business in Trieste making wool tracksuits, which they called Venjulia suits.

The tracksuits featured zippered legs, which Missoni has been credited with inventing. The Venjulia suits recognised the need of athletes for functional, warm garments enabling freedom of movement. In fact, they were worn by the Italian Olympic team in 1948.

It was while in London that he met 16-year-old Rosita Jelmini, an English student from Golasecca, Italy, who watched him compete.  They married in 1953, and their first son, Vittorio, was born in 1954. Luca (1956) and Angela (1958) followed.

Rosita’s family had a textiles business, making shawls, and together she and Ottavio set up a machine-knitwear workshop in Gallarate, not far from Sumirago and the town in which Rosita grew up. 

Soon they were supplying designs to the Biki boutique in Milan and to La Rinascente, the department store, where the first Missoni-labelled garments, a line of colourful vertically striped shirt-dresses, were displayed in the window in 1958. 

Ottavio Missoni in 2010

They held their first catwalk show in 1966, and the following year, presented a show at the Palazzo Pitti in Florence, which landed them in controversy after the show’s lighting had the effect of turning the models’ clothing see-through, a misfortune made worse by the fact that most of the models went without underwear so as not to spoil the line of the clothes they were showing off. The show was likened to a bawdy cabaret and the Missonis were not invited back.

However, the publicity the scandal attracted helped the Missonis. Their next presentation, in Milan, drew much press attention and, as Milan grew as a fashion capital, the Missonis went on to feature in many leading fashion magazines. 

With a new factory in Sumirago, in a beautiful country setting in the shadow of Monte Rosa, they opened their first in-store boutique at Bloomingdale's in New York in 1970. Their first directly-owned boutique in Milan followed in 1976. 

The company enjoyed such heights of prestige that in 1983 they were invited to design the stage costumes for a performance of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor at Teatro alla Scala in Milan, starring Luciano Pavarotti, and in 1990 some of the costumes for the opening ceremony for the football World Cup.

In 1997, Ottavio and Rosita retired, entrusted the future of the business in their children, appointing Vittorio as marketing director and Angela as creative director, with Luca taking a technical role. The company expanded into furniture and car interiors and even set up a chain of boutique hotels.

Sadly, tragedy struck the family shortly before Ottavio died when Vittorio was killed, along with his wife, Maurizia, when a small plane in which they were travelling crashed off the coast of Venezuela.

Travel tip:

As the crow flies, the city of Zadar in Croatia is 206km (128 miles) south-east of Trieste along the Dalmatian coast. At the time of Missoni’s birth it was called Zara, and was on Italian territory as part of the settlement of the Treaty of Rapallo, which rewarded Italy’s participation on the side of the Triple Entente (France, Russia and the United Kingdom) in defeating Germany in the First World War. With considerable Venetian influence, having for many years between the 13^th and 18^th centuries been part of the Republic of Venice, it is a city with a strong Italian flavour, retaining its beauty despite being bombed heavily during the Second World War.

Travel tip:

Sumirago, where Missoni made his home, is 15km (9 miles) south of Varese, a pleasant town a short distance from Lake Maggiore and overlooking its own picturesque lake. Well known as the location of the Sacro Monte di Varese (the Sacred Hill of Varese), which is scaled along a 2.5km path that passes 14 monuments built in the early part of the 17^th century, it is also home of the imposing Palazzo Estense and Villa Recalcati. Varese also has a cathedral, the Basilica di San Vittore, who can be found in an elegant square in the historic centre.

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