[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]On April 14, 1939, Guido Venosta\u2019s father, Giuseppe, died of liver cancer after months of excruciating suffering. That date marked a fundamental turning point in his son\u2019s life, as he was forced to confront the absolute impotence in curing the disease. It was an indescribable tragedy, for he lost in a short time the person he had loved most and with whom he had been closest, all without being able to do anything. Ten years later, the same fate befell his mother, Argia. About twenty years after that, these painful experiences would eventually bear fruit.<\/p>\n
Venosta himself recounts that in 1966 \u201csteps were taken at Pirelli, where I was an executive, to determine whether the company could provide a suitable person for an initiative that was just beginning to develop at that historical moment\u2014a small solidarity association that would later become the great Italian Association for Cancer Research. The records say that Franco Brambilla, then CEO of Pirelli S.p.A., mentioned my name\u2014also recalling the great success I had achieved in a recent fundraising campaign\u2014thus establishing the contact and marking the beginning of my journey into the nonprofit world.\u201d<\/p>\n
Venosta agreed to join the \u201csmall association\u201d for two fundamental reasons: one, a philanthropic motive, stemming from the conviction that \u201cthe social classes and groups who, by birth or by chance, had enjoyed the best living conditions ought to \u2018give back\u2019 to others; that is, they had the moral duty to intervene in the community for the benefit of those who had not been so fortunate (\u2026)\u201d. The other reason was personal\u2014the death from cancer of both of his parents.<\/p>\n
He then joined forces with Camilla Falck, then president of the association, and Aldo Borletti, one of the initiative\u2019s early proponents, who sought to establish an organization to support cancer research, modeled on those already active abroad: \u201cnonprofit in the Anglo-Saxon sense, that is, independent of any particular ideology or affiliation (\u2026)\u2014to join, one only needed to share the purpose (\u2026)\u201d, with its activities based on information dissemination and fundraising to support prevention and finance initiatives.<\/p>\n
It would not have been an easy task: once, when Venosta asked his friend Giovanni Spadolini\u2014then director of Il Corriere della Sera\u2014to cover the issue of cancer and the research being done to fight it, he was told that \u201cthe newspapers couldn\u2019t even mention the word \u2018cancer\u2019 as it alone would agitate readers, who refused to confront the subject.\u201d[\/vc_column_text][vc_media_grid element_width=”6″ gap=”15″ grid_id=”vc_gid:1743114674380-ee0795a4-b4bb-6″ include=”67924,67925,67922,67923″][vc_column_text]Sources:<\/b>
\nG. VENOSTA, \u201cUnpublished Memoirs\u201d, 1997\u20131998.
\nAlbiate (MB), Villa San Valerio, Villa San Valerio Archives, Guido Venosta Archive; AIRC\/FIRC Archive.<\/p>\n
Bibliography:<\/b>
\nG. VENOSTA,\u00a0Dal profit al nonprofit. Storia di un\u2019esperienza<\/i>, Milan, 1997.[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In 1966, Guido Venosta agreed to join a \u201csmall association\u201d dedicated to promoting awareness of the \u201cunnamable disease,\u201d cancer. Over the course of more than twenty years, that \u201csmall association\u201d would evolve into AIRC \u2013 the National Association for Cancer Research, exemplary in its approach and management.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":67920,"template":"","tags":[57],"class_list":["post-67556","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\/67556","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":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.fondazioneguidovenosta.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/protagonista\/67556\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67926,"href":"https:\/\/www.fondazioneguidovenosta.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/protagonista\/67556\/revisions\/67926"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fondazioneguidovenosta.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/67920"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fondazioneguidovenosta.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fondazioneguidovenosta.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}