[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]After returning to Italy in 1963\u2014at the end of a seven-year term in London as head of Pirelli Ltd\u2014Guido Venosta began establishing contacts with the Italian Liberal Party (PLI, which definitively disappeared in the late 1970s), \u201cto 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\u2026\u201d.<\/p>\n
Venosta joined the PLI, and after running in the municipal elections he served in the administration under three mayors: Pietro Bucalossi (1964\u20131970), Aldo Aniasi (1970\u20131980), and Carlo Tognoli (1980\u20131986). 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\u2019s wife), and Giorgio Strehler.<\/p>\n
It was precisely his work for the party that sparked his collaboration with the newly established AIRC\u2014the National Association for Cancer Research. In his book he only briefly alludes to it (Franco Brambilla, then CEO of Pirelli, noted that Venosta was \u201cremembered also for the great success I had achieved in a recent fundraising campaign\u2026\u201d [VENOSTA, Dal profit al nonprofit, p. 9]); however, in his unpublished Memoirs he provides further details, which are particularly interesting because they encapsulate the method that would later prove to be Guido Venosta\u2019s winning approach at AIRC:<\/p>\n
\u201cI 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\u2019s note]. In any case, for those times the campaign was a huge success\u2014or at least it was regarded as such within corporate circles\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Sources:<\/b>
\nAlbiate (MB), Villa San Valerio, Villa San Valerio Archives, Guido Venosta Archive, Memoirs (1997\u20131998), unpublished, pp. 43\u201345.[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
After returning to Italy in 1963, at the end of his seven-year term in London, Guido Venosta began establishing contacts with the Italian Liberal Party (which was definitively dissolved at the end of the 1970s). Venosta joined the Party and, by running in the municipal elections, became part of the Executive Committee under the leadership of three Mayors from 1964 to 1986. During that period, he represented the Municipality on the Board of Directors of the Piccolo Teatro in Milan, which was then led by Paolo Grassi, Nina Vinchi\u2014Grassi’s wife\u2014and Giorgio Strehler.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":67927,"template":"","tags":[57],"class_list":["post-67552","protagonista","type-protagonista","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-airc"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fondazioneguidovenosta.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/protagonista\/67552","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fondazioneguidovenosta.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/protagonista"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fondazioneguidovenosta.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/protagonista"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.fondazioneguidovenosta.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/protagonista\/67552\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67928,"href":"https:\/\/www.fondazioneguidovenosta.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/protagonista\/67552\/revisions\/67928"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fondazioneguidovenosta.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/67927"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fondazioneguidovenosta.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fondazioneguidovenosta.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}