Guido Venosta – Politics

After returning to Italy in 1963—at the end of a seven-year term in London as head of Pirelli Ltd—Guido Venosta began establishing contacts with the Italian Liberal Party (PLI, which definitively disappeared in the late 1970s), “to which the ideals of youth, the ever-present Risorgimento spirit of my paternal family, my historical readings, and my various stays in England brought me irrevocably close…”.

Venosta joined the PLI, and after running in the municipal elections he served in the administration under three mayors: Pietro Bucalossi (1964–1970), Aldo Aniasi (1970–1980), and Carlo Tognoli (1980–1986). During that period, he also represented the municipality on the Board of Directors of the Piccolo Teatro in Milan, then led by Paolo Grassi, Nina Vinchi (Grassi’s wife), and Giorgio Strehler.

It was precisely his work for the party that sparked his collaboration with the newly established AIRC—the National Association for Cancer Research. In his book he only briefly alludes to it (Franco Brambilla, then CEO of Pirelli, noted that Venosta was “remembered also for the great success I had achieved in a recent fundraising campaign…” [VENOSTA, Dal profit al nonprofit, p. 9]); however, in his unpublished Memoirs he provides further details, which are particularly interesting because they encapsulate the method that would later prove to be Guido Venosta’s winning approach at AIRC:

“I organized a fundraising campaign for the party for one of the various electoral campaigns I encountered along the way. It was a modest effort, carried out by sending letters to friends, asking each for 10, 50, at most 100,000 lire [equivalent to up to 50 euros, editor’s note]. In any case, for those times the campaign was a huge success—or at least it was regarded as such within corporate circles…”

Thus, Franco Brambilla considered his executive the most suitable person for the task of ensuring the success of AIRC, that is, to inform and mobilize public opinion on oncological research in order to launch a substantial and continuous fundraising campaign to finance it. And he was right.

Sources:
Albiate (MB), Villa San Valerio, Villa San Valerio Archives, Guido Venosta Archive, Memoirs (1997–1998), unpublished, pp. 43–45.