Monografia "La grande Impresa - Ligabue, cento anni della nostra storia"

1919 • 2019

LA GRANDE IMPRESA

Ligabue, cento anni della nostra storia

“ One of the great disadvantages of hurry is that it takes such a long time.�

Gilbert Keith Chesterton

To my daughter, Silvia Diletta.

So that memory be inspiration and example.

1919 • 2019

LA GRANDE IMPRESA

Ligabue, cento anni della nostra storia

Manual wall calendar, made of tin, 1965.

Contents 13

Introduction Inti Ligabue 19

The “art of trade” in one hundred years of Ligabue Alberto Clò 31

Anacleto Ligabue Massimo Orlandini 89

Giancarlo Ligabue Massimo Casarin 123

The new millennium Inti Ligabue 139

From the Study Centre to the Foundation Adriano Favaro 177

Patrons of Venetian sport Sebastiano Giorgi 189

One hundred years signed Ligabue Riccardo Ali

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Night view of the Piazzale Roma Ligabue headquarters, in use from 1953 to 2015.

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An article of 2 March 1957 illustrating Ligabue’s international business activities.

La grande impresa

conomic historians identify various phases in the tumultuous “short century”, as the twentieth century is often called.

In corporate management in particular, there were three great successive “eras” from the middle of the century to the present day.

The first period coincided with the economic boom of the 1960s: a time of stability and euphoria for the reconstruction after social values had been swept away by the Second World War. They were pioneering years, when profits were made simply by trading from one ecosystem to another: transporting goods the distance of a few kilometres already created a profit.

Charisma, enthusiasm and entrepreneurial flair were all that were required: the entrepreneur’s dashboard had only a few essential instruments, such as the costs and revenues dial; the rest had not yet been invented or wasn’t even needed. At this stage, when specialisation began to emerge, each company had its own product and its own customers. In a kind of tacit agreement, customers became permanent, untransferable corporate assets.

The 1960s and ‘70s in Italy witnessed the rise of the welfare state. Like a continental drift, an external social ecosystem was set in motion and it inexorably changed the scenarios.

It was a time of great mass movements and public opinion, from feminism to new trade union groups and student protests. Then entrepreneurial business management came on the scene. Economics left prehistory to tackle a world that had widened and embraced the interpretation of competition, production technologies and more complex human communities. Strategic variants turned to technological improvements to reduce costs, both material and human, and more sophisticated instruments enhanced the entrepreneur’s dashboard.

This was the advent of budgeting and business forecasts in the short and medium term. Managing became a complex profession and national and international contexts were no longer stable.

But the truly great economic revolution was to come in the late 1980s.

Humanity had taken two million years to change from stone tools to metal tools, in a few decades it achieved macroscopic technological and other revolutions: the development of communications in and between social communities, the end of ethnic isolation with geographical integration, the explosion of high finance, ecological problems and geopolitical aspects that began to impact on international economies.

Extraordinary events became unpredictable everyday occurrences, affecting businesses and sovereign states, at times severely undermining their foundations.

Increasingly exasperated competition pushed firms to surviving on the edge,

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and acquiring new customers became the fundamental objective of enterprises – gone was the time when they were a long-standing asset.

Henceforth, in a single day you could lose slices of business that had quietly survived for decades. The roles and activities of companies changed under these selective pressures: acquisitions, restructurings, downsizing and many other strategies were the frantic business response to trying to cope with falling revenues, but above all to the increasingly reduced contribution margins.

To evaluate and control the thousand variables, the entrepreneur’s dashboard became multidisciplinary and multifactorial.

It was in this context, with the end result determined solely by the market, that the past, a company’s image and its cultural wealth were in danger of turning into increasingly evanescent values.

This was a danger that we wanted to avoid at all costs.

When the centrifugal speed of the economy augments and visions are narrowed, I believe it is essential to look back and retrieve cultural, human and individual values, and to grasp the motivations and ideals for the future in our history and in our identity.

We must sometimes stop, as Aymara porters in South America warn us to do in an anecdote that my father was fond of telling, because “when we go too far forward too quickly, we must wait for our souls to catch up”.

Since the past must be connected to the future, bearing in mind the reality of today, there could be no better opportunity than such an important stage in the history of Ligabue – our first 100 years – to reconsider the path taken so far, the reasons and ideals that have inspired us, and our business and family history, inevitably interwoven over time with Italian and international events, changing customs, politics and economic developments.

With the activities of the Research and Study Centre and now of the Giancarlo Ligabue Foundation, as a company, we have always tried to keep our consciences alive and to further our thinking and that of the many people who live with us or interact with us, day after day.

But the time has come to remember and reiterate why we do it and why we will continue to do it. We have a story to tell, a “great adventure”. And we believe that we have the duty to remind ourselves and the younger generations about it, in the conviction that there can be no enterprise without shared passions and founding values.

In the pages of this book, therefore we retrace, the events of the Ligabue company through the three successive generations. First, we have the story of Anacleto, my grandfather, who started it all, retold by Massimo Orlandini; then the

Inti Ligabue Chairman of the Ligabue Group

15 Introduction

period when by my father, Giancarlo, pursued internationalisation and opened up new sectors, described by Massimo Casarin, one of the company’s closest collaborators and a great family friend; and, finally, the last few years, which I have written about in first person to relate the more recent crises, business developments and often little-known, far from easy decisions.

Everything is interwoven with the role that Ligabue has played in these 100 years, and the various areas in which it has operated.

Professor Alberto Clò analyses the historical figure of the entrepreneur and the nature of enterprise as they developed in this century; I am deeply grateful to him for his contribution. Adriano Favaro, a companion on many adventures with Giancarlo and for many years also editor of Ligabue Magazine, provides a detailed description of the scientific research projects and explorations, often conducted personally by my father, promoted by the Ligabue Research and Study Centre and now by the Foundation bearing his name.

This brings us to Ligabue’s passionate involvement in sport, related by Sebastiano Giorgi, and the evolution of the brand, charted by Riccardo Ali. His in some ways romantic exploration of our corporate image reveals how Ligabue interpreted the changing graphic art trends in the various periods.

Many travelling companions, leading personalities and enterprises appear in this story. But I would especially like to mention the covert true protagonists: the many workers at Ligabue, past and present, who, through their commitment, company loyalty, professionalism and competence, have sustained this enterprise and have contributed so much to its growth over the years. Today there are more than 7,700 of them.

The book, therefore, is a tribute to them and to all those who took part in this adventure. They have believed in us and given their support over the years, contributing indelibly to the future of this “Great Enterprise”.

Ad maiora Ligabue.

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Alberto Clò

The “art of trade” in one hundred years of Ligabue

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The conditions of a contract for food supplies to the Società di Navigazione Tirrenia, 1962.

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Handling goods outside the bonded warehouses at the Punto Franco, San Basilio, Venice, 1965.

La grande impresa

“It is an art or rather a discipline, practiced between qualified persons, governed by the law and concerned with all things marketable, for the maintenance of the human race, but also in the hope of financial gain.”

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ike any other living organism, enterprises are born and most also die. Ligabue’s century of life, therefore, is highly unusual in the entrepreneurial history of Italy, or elsewhere for that matter. Of the top twelve companies in the world rankings in terms of capitalisation, based on the Dow Jones index about a century ago, today only three are still in the first twelve. The others have slipped down the ranking, changed business, or no longer exist.

There are many reasons for this. Firstly, because some businesses can’t last forever.

This was the case, for example, with the trains of the company founded by George Mortimer Pullman in the late nineteenth century (then fourth in the rankings). Others fail to understand and anticipate changes in technology, products and markets, as happened to the American company Kodak, a leader in traditional photographic film that went bust because it didn’t foresee the change to digital technologies. Then there are those companies that only pursue profit as an end in itself and are more or less rapidly doomed to go into crisis because competition has increased enormously due to the integration of markets, globalisation processes and the extraordinary speed at which innovations travel. Until 1900, human knowledge doubled every century. Today it doubles every thirteen months.

The long adventure of the Ligabue company can’t be explained simply in terms of resilience and the capacity to deal with risk factors. Any such interpretation lacks the key underlying element: the human factor. At the risk of being banal, it must be said that companies are made up of women and men – of their passions, intuitions, skills and responsibilities – and they come before machines, productive optimisations, management methods and business practices. To understand companies in terms of their founding values, their vocation and their history, these albeit essential factors are not enough.

It requires much more to grasp the mechanisms involved in the birth, growth and life of companies. The fascinating portraits in this book of Anacleto Ligabue and Giancarlo Ligabue by Massimo Orlandini and Massimo Casarin, respectively, evoke images from remote times and the role that the so-called mercatura (trade) had in Italy at the end of the Middle Ages. A merchant from Ragusa (now Dubrovnik), but an adoptive Venetian, Benedetto Cotrugli was the first to describe the double-entry book-keeping method. In his Book of the Art of Trade (1458), he described mercatura:

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Reading about the opening of the first shops and the creation of the company “Anacleto Ligabue” in Venice on 15 July 1919, registered to trade in “Emilian cheese, butter and cured meats” to which “wines in bottles and barrels” were later added along with “fodder and colonial goods”, conjures up an image of the places and the atmosphere in sixteenth-century Venice, once masterfully depicted by the great French historian Fernand Braudel, who, incidentally, contributed the preface to Giancarlo Ligabue’s book Il pane e la chiglia (Bread and Keels, 1985). In 1977, Braudel wrote:

“But the great commercial spectacle, yesterday as well as today, occurred in the Rialto Square, opposite the Rialto Bridge and the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, now the main post office for the city. In about 1530, Pietro Aretino, whose house was on the Grand Canal, used to enjoy watching boats loaded with fruit and mountains of melons coming in from the islands of the lagoon to this ‘stomach’ of Venice, for the double Rialto Square, formed by the Rialto Nuovo and the Rialto Vecchio, was the ‘stomach’ and heart of all exchanges, of all business, great and small.

A few steps away from the noisy stalls of this double square the major wholesalers of the city would meet in their Loggia, built in 1455 – one could almost say in their Bourse – where each morning they would discuss confidentially their businesses, maritime insurance and shipping.They would buy, sell and sign contracts with one another or with merchants from outside Venice. A bit farther on were the banchieri (bankers) in their narrow shops, ready to settle these transactions at once by transfers of funds from one account to another. Also close at hand – they are still on the very spot today – were the Herberia (vegetable market), the Pescheria (fish 05

Anacleto Ligabue’s first business card, 1920.

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market), and, a little farther along in the old Ca’ Querini, the Beccarie (butcher shops), around the butchers’ church of San Matteo, which was not demolished until the late nineteenth century.”

“For actions which consist in carrying out innovations, we reserve the term Enterprise; the individuals who carry them out we call Entrepreneurs...

The fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from the new consumers’ goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates… The function of entrepreneurs is to reform or revolutionize the pattern of production by exploiting an invention or, more generally, an untried technological possibility for producing a new commodity or producing an old one in a new way, by opening up a new source of supply of material or a new outlet for products, by reorganizing an industry and so on.”

The development of capitalism is thus based on the “spirit of enterprise”, on the desire to innovate, to create, to act. The entrepreneur is the catalysing element in a process of “creative destruction”, which according to Schumpeter leads to the continuous triumph of the new over the old. The entrepreneur-innovator is the soul of capitalism and the prime mover of development, with specific personal qualities corresponding to the concept of leadership.

It was with this innovative spirit and capacity for leadership that the Ligabue com-

The “Art of Trade” in a Hundred Years of Ligabue

Five centuries later, things don’t seem to have changed much. Cotrugli also pointed out that the art of trade and its perpetuation over time require several conditions, although they were actually more like virtues, such as: a complete knowledge of commercial techniques; a solid, well-defined system of values; being capable of action, but also of study; being a good citizen, since a good merchant develops from a good citizen and not vice versa; not being obsessed only with accumulating wealth, but being generous and using wealth positively.

From these solid roots, capable of surviving the vicissitudes of time, the century-old history of Ligabue passed through different phases in relation to several factors: changing external circumstances; new commercial and technical opportunities; and the ability to seize them by those who managed the company and its workers.

A characteristic trait of the company and its staff was the innovative capacity that was to contribute to the development and transformation of the company from an artisanal firm to a modern enterprise, as defined, for example, by the great Austrian economist Joseph A. Schumpeter:

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A letter to the Società di Navigazione Adriatica concerning a maritime contract just signed in Venice, 13 April 1937.

pany was established, based on the idea of creating a new market (food supplies or “catering”), which developed over time in different phases, marked by the progressive broadening of its range, its nature and geographical horizons of its actions as well as changes in types of customers. The first phase, started in 1919, was limited to the supply of foodstuffs to Italian shipowners’ vessels leaving Venice for far-off destinations.

In the second phase, started in 1929, business expanded to the innovative “maritime contract” also for ships departing from other ports, and the complete management of the galley and on-board kitchen services, involving assuming the risk instead of the shipowners and a commitment to raise the quality of the food for crews.

The impact on supplies was enormous, as demonstrated by the more than threefold increase of ships served: from 130 in the early 1940s to 400 in the 1950s (cargo ships, ferries, transatlantic liners and cruise ships). There was particularly important, close collaboration with Enrico Mattei’s Eni. Of humble origins like Anacleto Ligabue, Mattei had a strong personality and was driven by a powerful desire for success. They shared a capacity for ingenious ideas and an enlightened vision of the social role of companies. Mattei’s policy was to offer Italian companies opportunities for development in the group’s various businesses in Italy and abroad. This is exactly what happened with Aristide Merloni – both hailed from Matelica – who started building gas cylinders for Agip Gas in 1953, and with the Venetian Ligabue, who was contracted to supply Eni’s maritime fleet (already begun in 1943 with Agip), oil platforms and operational bases around the world.

In 1959, Snam (an Eni subsidiary) launched its first prospecting and drilling platform called Scarabeo I. Mazzini Pissard, an Eni pioneer, who oversaw its construction, wrote:

“The canteen, galley and cabin cleaning service has been entrusted to the Ligabue company from Venice; it provides a similar service on all Snam ships.

The supplies come from duty-free warehouses.The service is impeccable, we will use it wherever the need arises.”

In another book of memoirs, Antonio delle Canne describes a 1967 Eni Group board meeting in Iran, where crude oil was being extracted by the SIRIP platform in the Persian Gulf. A short distance away the Agip-Ancona ship was moored.

“Taking advantage of the calm sea and bearing in mind the age of the group… After sailing for about twenty minutes, we arrived at the tanker from which the ‘stately starboard ladder’ had been lowered to facilitate our climb on board. Here the captain, after the visit, insisted that we stay for lunch and, knowing that the catering was provided by Ligabue, we welcomed the invitation with particular pleasure.”

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An article published by the newspaper Il Giorno, 25 May 1968.

The “Art of Trade” in a Hundred Years of Ligabue

In short, for the world of Eni, the Ligabue company was a choice that could be boasted about as a guarantee of good quality. It was, after all, a question of catering for its top management, foreign guests, officers and crew. This was exactly the aim of the Ligabue management: guarantee customers in all parts of the world the maximum food safety and quality by exporting the best Italian products and lifestyle.

The third phase in the development of Ligabue involved diversifying into various business sectors. From the 1960s: cruise ships, on-board shops, and oil mining worksites. From the 1970s: aircraft and airports (bars, restaurants, duty-free shops) and construction company sites. And in more recent years: ferries and ports. This very demanding strategy required a complete knowledge of the new markets or sectors characterised by much more intense competitive trends compared to those the company had previously faced.

To be successful, there had to be a focus on the innovative capacity to improve product quality, procurement policies, supply modalities, logistic and organisational structures. This set of conditions had to achieve a higher production efficiency and competitive capacity thanks also to economies of scale, resulting from greater sales volumes.

The company grew steadily over time apart from interludes due to uncontrollable exogenous events such as the Great Depression of 1929, the Second World War, and geopolitical tensions in the Middle East. Continuing business during these events made the enterprise founded in 1919 even more remarkable. The highly original idea of operating in the service sector, a forerunner with respect to the new productive horizons focused on the manufacturing industries, contrasted with the limited growth of commerce in those years. Wholesale businesses in the Veneto and the rest of Italy employed a mere 0.8 per cent of the population in an economy still dominated by agriculture. Even the end of the First World War and peace didn’t bring back the happy days of the past but rather the impoverishment of large social strata.

1919 was a crucial year and not only for the important political elections. In the early months of the year, commerce, including retailing, collapsed, because consumers preferred not to buy but to wait for a fall in prices. The end of controlled currency exchanges on 25 March 1919, in turn, sent the lira plummeting to a fifth of its value in 1914: in June 1914 it took 5.18 lire to buy one dollar; in December 1919, 13.03 lire, and a year later 28.57 lire. The cost of imports soared and consequently also retail prices.

In July 1919, mobs raided warehouses in many cities and towns.

It was to this social, political and economic background that Anacleto Ligabue registered his company at the Venice Chamber of Commerce on 15 July 1919. The category of the new company’s activities was and remained so specific that it can’t be compared with trends in the manufacturing industry. It can’t be seen, therefore, in

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Agip mining workers in a canteen managed

by Ligabue in Morocco, 1960.

terms of the business theory whereby practical considerations were beginning to be accorded precedence over theoretical abstractions arising from the developments of managerial economics and strategy studies.

Today an enterprise will enjoy enduring success if it knows how to adopt the latest innovations: such as new technology, easily acquired on the market and, even more importantly, the much less accessible organisational, managerial and cultural innovations. A successful company knows how to operate in real time in all stages of the supply chain, and is connected round the clock 24/7 with the rest of the globe. Especially if, as in the case of Ligabue, it operates in every corner of the world. Innovating didn’t necessarily mean doing new things but rather doing better those things once done in deeply-rooted local traditions, such as those found in Venice’s rich cultural heritage.

Of the subject of corporate size, it is worth describing what for Ligabue was from the outset an indispensable, imperative feature: internationalisation. This dimension was mainly consolidated in the 1960s and ‘70s, and led the group to achieve seven tenths of its sales volume abroad. Although Italy had always been greatly dependent on foreign markets to make up for weakness due to the scarcity of raw materials at home, only in the last decades of the twentieth century did Italian industry vigorously embrace internationalisation both in trade and production localisation.

Pursuing internationalisation today is an essential strategy for survival. Doing it a century ago was something completely different. Only a few companies worked with foreign countries, mainly exporting agricultural products (legumes, vegetables, citrus fruits, wine and rice), and much fewer industrial products (textiles and marble goods). The negative trade balance was 13 billion lire in exports against 20 billion of imports. The low level of internationalisation was not helped by the backward, insubstantial Italian fleet, with just 1,434 mechanically propelled ships as opposed to 2,629 sailing vessels.

Gradually opening up to the world starting from scratch was a feat that it is no exaggeration to call heroic. It required specific professional skills, from knowledge of customs legislation to multi-ethnic food requirements; an organisational structure divided into operating bases, network of suppliers and distribution systems; and adequate operational flexibility with the ability to adapt to changing external circumstances.

But it also meant being exposed – given the ever-wider spectrum of countries and sectors in which it operated – to unpredictable international geopolitical tensions.

This was the case with the switching of routes following the closure of the Suez Canal (1967-1975) or, after its reopening (1985), the decommissioning of the large vessels previously used in circumnavigating Africa.

Ligabue’s paths of growth, despite the inevitable obstacles it had to overcome, have

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The “Art of Trade” in a Hundred Years of Ligabue

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yielded results that speak for themselves: the few meals supplied a century ago became 20 million in 1985 and are currently 40 million. The operational bases have risen to 400 in 16 countries employing 7,000 people from 40 countries. All of this is required to supply 6,000 ships, 32 oil platforms and 115 work camps in areas that are often difficult to reach, plus a large number of airports, planes, shops and restaurants.

To go back to Cotrugli’s characteristics for a good merchant, today good entrepreneurs must similarly not only be dedicated to accumulation for their own advantage, but also know how to be generous and use what they accumulate positively. This means going beyond one’s own economic role to consider the needs and expectations of the community. Examples are provided by great men and business leaders, such as Enrico Mattei and Adriano Olivetti, who must be credited with redesigning the relationship between enterprise and society that goes beyond the albeit commendable corporate paternalism of entrepreneurs, such as Rossi, Crespi, Marzotto and Pirelli.

And this is exactly what can also be said of Anacleto and Giancarlo Ligabue who, as Adriano Favaro writes in this book “loved to navigate in a system that brought together corporate responsibility, scientific research and the dissemination of knowledge”, thus giving back to society a large part of what he had received from it. Today this propensity is referred to as “Corporate Social Responsibility” (CSR), namely:

“The striving of a company – and, therefore, primarily of its top management – to increasingly satisfy the legitimate social, environmental and economic expectations of the various internal and external stakeholders through the pursuit of its activities.”

This kind of social responsibility contrasts with the conviction that a firm’s raison d’être was and is only the generation of profit or the creation of value for its shareholders.

Ligabue has always embraced social responsibility and has included it in what the business strategy handbooks describe as “corporate philanthropy”, as theorised by the guru Michael E. Porter, not only as an expression of a philanthropic spirit, but also as a strategy to acquire a competitive advantage, capable in the long term of earning the company a new, more prolific positioning on the market and a greater reputation.

We find ample evidence of the ways Ligabue has developed CSR in its history: from offering services to its “collaborators”, as Anacleto used to call his employees (housing in the Ligabue Village or professional training) to supporting various sports clubs; from its attention to the science of nutrition to commitments in the world of culture that are not elitist, but popularising, shared and visible. In 1973, this latter commitment culminated in Giancarlo Ligabue’s creation of the Ligabue Study and Research Centre, now the Ligabue Foundation, which conducted hundreds of expeditions on five continents in a close network of relationships with other scientists, research cen-

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Loading supplies aboard a ship in the port of Venice, 1960.

The “Art of Trade” in a Hundred Years of Ligabue

tres and universities. Its discoveries have become an integral part of the history of palaeontology, archaeology, anthropology and ethnology.

What has been outlined so far here must be preserved by memory. For without memory, there is no handing on of values, principles and knowledge: we fail to understand the present, as the future becomes distant and nebulous. In short, to use Cotrugli’s words, the “good merchant” must be capable of “remembering the past, assessing the present and providing for the future”. And that is why it is worth reconstructing the story of an Italian company capable of seizing business opportunities that others didn’t see, of overcoming unavoidable great difficulties and knowing how to combine the “art of trade” with an attention to the social world, science, culture and its local region.

Recognising all this does not mean succumbing to rhetoric that is always inevitably and rightly part of every anniversary, especially of such magnitude. It is, above all else, due recognition of the work, sacrifice and dedication of the thousands of women and men who have made the history of Ligabue day by day: starting with the company founder, Anacleto; then the man who consolidated the enterprise in the world, Giancarlo; and Inti, his son, who is at the helm today.

I would like to end with a personal recollection of the morning of 20 December 2004, when in a crowded room in the Faculty of Economics at the University of Bologna, in front of the graduation committee, Inti and I publicly discussed his degree dissertation, while his father, Giancarlo, looked on, deeply moved, as his son told the story of the company of which he has now become the head.

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Massimo Orlandini

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Anacleto Ligabue, after being wounded in the war, with fellow soldiers who also took part in the Battle of the Isonzo. Treviso Military Hospital, 15 August 1915.

La grande impresa

he roads of life are unpredictable. Some people begin their existence already moving through the streets of a big city, with its traffic and pulsating life, and some start off in dusty rural lanes, like those in the countryside of the province of Reggio Emilia. Being born in Villa Argine, an outlying hamlet of the small town of Cadelbosco di Sopra would therefore seem to mean your destiny was already forged: closing social gaps is often more difficult than moving through physical distances – improving your living conditions requires more effort than moving from one place to another.

Anacleto Ligabue was born at Villa Argine. The only child in a working-class family, he was to rise to challenge his destiny by overcoming prejudices and difficulties. He became a successful entrepreneur, an innovator and absolute precursor in the field of maritime supplies and contracts. And he did so in Venice, a city that, although not very far from his native region, was completely foreign to him and almost the opposite extreme from his tiny village in rural Emilia. It was a city surrounded by the sea instead of land, an area of lively international trade, as opposed to cattle breeding, agricultural traditions and cooperation with values that rarely changed because they provided a certain security, also in social terms.

However, Villa Argine was to give Anacleto Ligabue a local product that became a faithful travelling companion, and without which the maritime supply company of A. Ligabue might never have been founded or have enjoyed such great success at sea: Parmigiano Reggiano (parmesan cheese). Anacleto preferred simply to call only it “reggiano”, in honour of its origin, and it was the key that opened the doors of ships’ kitchens and galleys. For whole decades, he bought up the whole production of La Grande dairy cooperative at Villa Argine, and of other nearby dairies. La Grande had a special iron brand made – an anchor with the inscription “Ligabue” – to mark the cheese forms chosen for maritime supplies. Ligabue matured parmesan in its own warehouses in Venice and Anacleto would often personally check the state of maturity of his cheeses. He would open a form and offer some slices to his customers, especially shipowners (like his great friend Achille Lauro), when they visited the “Galley of galleys”, as his warehouse was humorously called.

From all this we can already sense that we are in for a very original story. It begins on 17 June 1894 in this area of rural Emilia, with the birth of the eldest son of Alcide, a builder, and Carolina Magnani, a housewife. They called him Anacleto, like his grandfather. Times were hard and his mother Carolina gave birth six more times, but none of the children survived and, in September 1902, she also tragically died, leaving her husband and son alone. Anacleto was only eight years old. Now a widower at the age of thirty-three, his father, Alcide, remarried a few months later. His new wife, Faustina, was twenty-three and came from a nearby village.

She bore him two more children. After completing primary school at Villa Argine,

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Sergeant Ligabue with the staff of the officers’ mess in Venice, 1916.

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Diploma conferring the War Cross of Merit on Anacleto Ligabue, signed by the Interim War Minister, Benito Mussolini, Rome, 11 May 1928.

as an adolescent Anacleto already helped his father by working as a brickie’s lad, often carrying heavy bags of mortar on his shoulders.

In 1911, the family moved to Reggio Emilia and the sturdy seventeen-year-old was very keen to work and learn about the world. He was fascinated by the stories of a middle class professional, in whose house he did some work on behalf of his father. This man had a son who studied abroad and he often talked to Anacleto about Switzerland and Germany – unknown, fascinating places, worlds just waiting to be discovered. Anacleto’s employer encouraged him to improve his skills by learning a new job and suggested the hotel and restaurant trade. He convinced him to go to Massa Carrara (Tuscany) and take up a job as a hotel porter.

Little is known about this stage of Anacleto’s life. His desire to travel and succeed in a new field for him, the food and restaurant business, was certainly also inspired by the abundance of his homeland that always had excellent products, from Parmesan cheese to cured meats and wines.

Anacleto wanted to broaden his horizons and managed to get himself hired in the Compagnia dei vagoni ristoranti (a railway dining car company), where he had to start from the humblest job. But at last he was travelling and seeing unusual places. For a boy of his age, it meant stepping out towards a new life. Being quick-witted, he was soon promoted to the role of waiter and busied himself with all sorts of small deals. Incidentally, the train also stopped off in Venice, a strange city, floating on water, where well-dressed wealthy ladies and gentlemen alighted from the carriages and took a gondola to the most luxurious hotels in the city. This was the first view of a world that the young Anacleto could only dream about and admire from afar. For the time being.

The Great War When called up to do national service in the Royal Italian Army in late 1914, Anacleto was a jovial, capable twenty-year-old. He thus interrupted his civilian career and went for military training with 66th Infantry Regiment based in Reggio Emilia. His registration card tells us he was 1.75 metres tall, had brown hair and brown eyes, could read and write and was a waiter to trade. During his national service, however, Italy entered the war (24 May 1915), so he was sent to the front and his regiment was deployed on the River Isonzo in the Tolmino area (now Tolmin in Slovenia).

Three months later, on 14 August, he was wounded in heroic circumstances: Ligabue’s company had been isolated by an enemy action and there was a need to communicate with the other units: this meant leaving the trenches and running

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Postcard of the 66th Infantry Regiment, 1915; Anacleto Ligabue was in this regiment when he was wounded at Tolmino on 14 August, a few days after the second Battle of the Isonzo.

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into the open to reach the rest of the division. As everyone was keenly aware, it was very dangerous. One of his mates drew the short straw. But Anacleto knew that he was a family man and offered to go instead. After leaving the trench, he was spotted by the Austro-Hungarians who opened fire and exploded grenades all round him. When he halfway across the open terrain, he was hit but, despite being wounded in the leg, he managed to accomplish his mission. This heroic feat won him a war cross for merit.

On 15 August, Anacleto was transported out of the war zone and later transferred to the military hospital of Treviso. His wound was serious but not life-threatening.

It would take time to recover even for a strong soldier like Anacleto, for there were complications, and he was unable return to the front. Given that in civilian life he had been a waiter, he was assigned to the officers’ mess in Venice. The supply problems were enormous and almost all the restaurants in the city were closed.

Moreover, Venice was considered to be a war zone: in the Arsenale, the historic shipyards of the Serenissima, military ships were rigged out and repaired. Austrian seaplanes took off from Trieste to bomb them. On 24 October 1915 they also destroyed the ceiling with frescoes by Giambattista Tiepolo in the church of the Scalzi, next to the railway station. “You need to aim at a Tiepolo to hit a station” was the scornful comment of Karl Kraus, the Viennese journalist, polemicist and inveterate pacifist.

Anacleto Ligabue, therefore, had to see to it that the officers’ mess was adequately supplied. The country lad from Emilia knew where to get what he was looking for, and the products of his home region began to flow into Venice. The circle was closed: Venice and its port, with ships arriving from all over the world were to be the hub of his whole life.

On 21 June 1917, Anacleto Ligabue was promoted to sergeant but a few months later, at the end of October, Italy suffered the disastrous defeat at Caporetto.

The Italians dug into defensive positions on the River Piave; now even Venice was in danger of being invaded. The Austrians were convinced that they would soon take the city and reach as far as the River Po. A massive effort was required to halt the enemy advance. The last remaining semi-able-bodied men were called to the front: convalescents, the partially incapacitated, waiters, cooks, quartermasters, etc. Ligabue was sent to near the Vidor bridge over the River Piave, in the Treviso area. But after a month, in November 1917, he was assigned to a garrison battalion, made up of sick, elderly or wounded officers and soldiers, who served behind the lines, providing assistance to the troops on the front. After the war, Anacleto remained in the army for another ten months and he was only finally discharged in September 1919.

The port of Venice had reached a peak of traffic in 1912, with three million tons of goods per year. It was Italy’s second port after Genoa and now aspired to return to its pre-war levels. Someone in the city’s military command evidently remembered how well the officers’ mess had been run by Sergeant Ligabue and he was entrusted with its management again, this time as a civilian. Given the excellent quality of the products he imported from Emilia to Venice, Anacleto expanded his business and, in addition to managing the mess, he opened a shop in the very central street of Spadaria (at no. 700), just behind Piazza San Marco. Not long afterwards, he opened a second shop in the short Calle Paradiso, which ends on Riva del Vin, near Rialto.

On 1 July 1919, Anacleto Ligabue thus opened a business whose corporate purpose, registered on 15 July at the Venice Chamber of Commerce, was to sell “Emilian cheese, butter and cured meats”.

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The founding of the “Anacleto Ligabue” company

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The Ligabue family on holiday at Enego on the Asiago Plateau, 1935.

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The Ligabue family at home in Venice, 1940.

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In addition to these new developments in the professional sphere, Anacleto Ligabue’s private life was also about to change. At the military hospital of Treviso, during his convalescence, he had met a medical officer from his local area, called Wando Lasagni, who had been a food merchant in civilian life. Having heard that Anacleto was commissioned to supply the officers’ mess, Lasagni told him to get in touch with a relative, Giustino Mazzieri, a landowner at San Martino in Rio, a town in the province of Reggio Emilia near Correggio, less than twenty kilometres

Anacleto Ligabue

Marriage to Zita

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Sergeant Anacleto Ligabue in his office in the officers’ mess, Venice, 1916.

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The founding deed of Anacleto Ligabue’s firm, 15 July 1919.

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The founding deed of “Ligabue Anacleto & C.”, 21 September 1921.

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Anacleto Ligabue (bareheaded in the background) with the chairman, Gualtiero Fries, and managers of the Società Veneziana di Navigazione, 1920s.

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The motorship Mauly, was the first vessel under contract with Ligabue, 1920s.

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Loading supplies on board ship in the port of Venice, 1945.

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The motorship Marin Sanudo, also built at Monfalcone and under contract with Libague in the late 1920s.

from Villa Argine. Mazzieri offered Anacleto help in sourcing quality food and wine for the Venetian officers’ mess, and so they worked together. Moreover, Mazzieri had a daughter called Zita, and Anacleto fell in love with her. The two got married on 20 January 1920 at San Martino in Rio, and their first daughter, Carolina, was born the following January.

At first, the young bride and baby didn’t go to live in Venice, where Anacleto was expanding his business and looking for a suitable home for the family near Rialto. In 1920, he added the “business of bottled and cask wines” to the company’s registered products. Presumably, in addition to parmesan cheese, Ligabue had also begun to sell Lambrusco, the celebrated Emilian wine. The immediate post-war years were a difficult, turbulent and complicated period and many businesses ran into difficulty.

Meanwhile, the whole family had moved to Venice. The couple’s second daughter, Liliana, had been born, and Ligabue expanded the business to deal in “fodder and colonial goods”. Of course, there couldn’t have been many horses in Venice, but the old Venetian word for a grocery shop was biavarol (literally “fodder-seller”). At that time there were 280 in the city, including the two that Anacleto had opened, one near Piazza San Marco and the other close to the Rialto bridge.

Anacleto continued to strengthen his ties with producers in his home region, and especially with Ercole Camurani, whose Cremeria Reggiana was to provide Ligabue with cheese and butter for decades, and Arduini Artemisio, who supplied him with cured meats and other pork products. These contacts reveal what was always to be Anacleto Ligabue’s strategy: look for the best possible high-quality genuine foods and wines at the most advantageous prices.

Ships ahoy!

The crucial opening for maritime supplies arrived when Anacleto met Gualtiero Fries, chariman of the Società Veneziana di Navigazione (Venetian Shipping Company), who suggested he supply the shipping company’s vessels.

Two major events in 1919 were to completely change the commercial balance of the upper Adriatic: work began on the construction of Porto Marghera in Venice and the Treaty of Saint Germain was signed, which gave Trieste to Italy. Moreover, the shipping company Lloyd Austriaco ceased to exist; until 1914 it had monopolised the routes to the Far East. In 1924, the Trieste shipyard at Monfalcone, owned by the Cosulich family (it now belongs to Fincantieri, which builds the largest cruise ships in the world), launched the Mauly, the first motorship with diesel engines produced in the yards, which began to sail two years later under the Venetian flag, together with the Marin Sanudo, also built at Monfalcone.

Anacleto Ligabue

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Anacleto Ligabue with a chief steward and chef, organising supplies on board, 1935.

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Interior detail of the Venice warehouses, not yet not called the “Galley of galleys�, 1925.

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Transporting wine barrels with the Ligabue brand mark, 1954.

26. The first Ligabue

price list, early 1920s.

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Brand for forms of Parmigiano Reggiano cheese, in use from 1945 to around 1960.

Anacleto Ligabue

In 1926, Anacleto and Zita’s third daughter, Anna Maria, was born.

The Mauly was the first ship to receive supplies from Anacleto Ligabue (a model of it is displayed in a glass case in the current company headquarters). Anacleto, however, no longer simply wanted to supply ships with good quality food. He was working on the idea that would completely revolutionise the world of maritime supplies and also the future of Ligabue, about to become the large company that it still is today. The idea was to create a “maritime contract”. This meant not simply selling food supplies (called the panatica – the seamen’s “board”) to the shipowner, but taking over the entire galley service and assuming the business risk instead of the shipowners. Everyone benefitted from the new maritime supply contract. The shipowners had one less service to manage and the advantage of fixed costs that were planned at the beginning of the contract. Ligabue could achieve economies of scale: by controlling purchase costs, consumption on board and the service, while guaranteeing the quality of the food at a fixed rate. Controls were carried out by inspectors who made frequent visits to the ships. This was a ground-breaking change in the industry. Ligabue selected and trained cooks and galley staff – a innovation introduced by Anacleto – who had to keep a register for the purpose of managing food consumption on board. A specific figure was later created for passenger ships, the maestro di casa (chief steward), a Ligabue employee, who supervised the catering services.

Gualtiero Fries entrusted Anacleto Ligabue with two of his company’s motorships, the Mauly and the Marin Sanudo. Newly entered into service, they covered the Venice-Calcutta route and, after a few years, were joined by the Barbarigo, launched in 1930. This was the beginning of a gradually expanding business. The system obviously worked very well. It met the shipowners’ requirements and so contracts for other vessels began to come in from companies such as The Società anonima di navigazione San Marco, associated with the Società Veneziana, and Puglia, which covered the route to Alexandria in Egypt.

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Ligabue still also ran two shops. It was a time of fast growth in commercial shipping: the Società Veneziana increased its fleet from eight to fourteen ships and extended its route as far as Rangoon (now Yangon in Myanmar). Fries became an increasingly powerful figure and was appointed president of the Fascist Federation of Western Adriatic Shipowners. In April 1932, the Società Veneziana, San Marco, Puglia and other minor shipowners merged to create a new company called Adriatica di navigazione (it eventually joined Tirrenia in 2004). A year earlier the International Shipping Congress was held in Venice; 182 shipowners representing 283 ships took part. For Anacleto, it was an unrivalled opportunity to meet potential customers and make himself known.

Meanwhile, on 30 October 1931, Giancarlo was born, Zita and Anacleto’s fourth child and future chairman of Ligabue.

A ground-breaking idea: ship catering 28

Table of daily food requirements for Lloyd Triestino officers, 1933.

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Table of weekly food requirements for the crews of three Società di Navigazione Adriatica ships, 5 May 1937 30

List of the contracted ships in 1950; the figure that had been reached in 1943 was only bettered in 1956.

Anacleto Ligabue

The idea was not entirely new. It had already been introduced by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV’s finance minister and a merchant’s son, to favour the development and modernisation of the French navy and its supplies. As we have seen, in the late 1920s, Ligabue put the finishing touches to the maritime catering contract. He realised that it was not just a question of supplying the crews with food and drink. Going beyond the traditional figure of the maritime supplier, he saw the need to reorganise the canteen on board, and abandon the concept of the panatica that had been typical of the crew’s diet up to then (this name explicitly alluded to bread baked twice, a forerunner of the dry biscuit).

Seamen had notoriously had a monotonous, unbalanced poor diet. Ligabue aimed for a much healthier one. He insisted that shipowners install refrigerators on board instead of the old ice-boxes. He introduced the first bakery ovens on ships, so that he could finally eliminate dry biscuits. He not only offered more varied menus but selected the foodstuffs to adapt the supplies to the routes and to the ethnic groups aboard. In fact, supplying a ship bound for South America or one that goes to the East requires different solutions. Various factors must be taken into account, such as climatic conditions and different eating habits.

The innovations introduced by the maritime contract were of key importance.

The galley had long been previously the source of speculation by commanders and cooks in the direct pay of the shipowners. Scrimping on supplies brought increased earnings, but of course it also meant that the crew might be undernourished, thus making them dissatisfied and inefficient. Ligabue launched the table of minimum requirements, a benchmark for on-board supplies. This was a complete

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An advertisement for the Ristorante Bar Autorimessa at Piazzale Roma, managed by Ligabue from 1941 onwards.

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Interior views of the large warehouses at Piazzale Roma, 1945.

change of outlook. Ligabue realised that he had two customers: on one hand, the shipowner or paying customer and, on the other, the crew, who had to eat, and therefore must be satisfied with what was served up. In this way, what was later to be known as “Si mangia Ligabue” (Ligabue-style eating) was created.

In the meantime, there had been a major reorganisation in the shipping sector in 1936. The nine existing companies were reduced to four, under the control of Finmare: Lloyd Triestino, Adriatica, Italia and Tirrenia, based in Trieste, Venice, Genoa and Naples, respectively. In addition to these four large public companies, there were various private shipping companies, the most famous being Flotta Lauro in Naples. Ligabue managed 27 contracted vessels belonging to seven different shipowners, including some passenger ships: Adriatica’s Adriatic and Barletta, for example, or the old steamer Palatino and the motorship Città di Catania (registered in Palermo). By now it was the eve of the Second World War, and ships were being used for troop transport: for the Spanish civil war in 1937 and the Italian occupation of Albania in 1939.

The restaurant-bar in Piazzale Roma

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On 25 April 1933, St Mark’s Day, the new Venice car terminal was officially opened. Then as today called Piazzale Roma, it was based on a project by Eugenio Miozzi, and was the point of arrival of the new causeway bridge across the lagoon (Ponte della Libertà): now the city was no longer only connected to the mainland by train but cars could also arrive in Venice. Anacleto realised that the new piazza was a strategic point in the city and demonstrated his entrepreneurial flair by investing, even in time of war (1941) in another enterprise.

Near his new headquarters on the Fondamenta Santa Chiara, he took over the Littorio Ristorante Bar, and renamed it the Ristorante Bar Autorimessa. It was situated at the corner of a large new building finished in 1934; the Ligabue management lasted for exactly thirty years, until Anacleto’s death in 1971.

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Minutes from a Board of Directors meeting highlighting the difficulties of the company at the end of the war, 1945.

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The Board of Directors Report for the first post-war year (1946): the recovery had begun.

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Loading supplies on the Angelina Lauro at Ligabue’s Colón branch in Panama, 1967.

Anacleto Ligabue

In June 1940, Italy entered another war, heralding difficult years for everyone, including Ligabue. The arrivals of ships were now announced only one day in advance, and then always had to be confirmed on sight, or as the vessels were about to enter port. Supplies left by train from the Venetian warehouses for other Italian ports and had to be escorted by company staff to prevent them from being diverted into dead-end sidings, especially at the Bologna junction. The cargo had to be watched over when air attack alarms sounded. Moreover, the Ligabue carriages had to travel fast when there was meat or other perishable foodstuffs aboard.

In 1943, 129 vessels were contracted out to Ligabue and, for the first time the list included ships belonging to the companies Lauro and Sidarma, which was then based in Fiume (now Rijeka, Croatia). At this time collaboration with Agip, the state oil company began, a relationship that continues today. Ligabue managed their tanker Sergio Laghi, one of the few ships that was to survive the war. In 1940, the Italian merchant fleet could rely on 786 ships over 500 tons, by 1945 they were reduced to just over ninety.

After the armistice of 8 September 1943, Italy was split into two: while the South was under Allied military rule, in the North, the Italian Social Republic (or Republic of Salò) was established under the control of the Nazis. Ligabue was also divided: the offices in Brindisi and Naples were to remain cut off from those in northern Italy.

An episode retold in the memoirs of the Venetian fashion designer Giuliana Coen Camerino (who became celebrated as Roberta di Camerino) highlights Anacleto’s noble spirit. Giuliana and her husband, Guido Camerino, were both Jews and in 1944 the situation was growing increasingly dangerous for them. They planned to leave by train, despite very obviously being a couple on the run. Fortunately for them, when they were in the station, they bumped into Anacleto Ligabue.

“Are you crazy? If you move like this, within half an hour you’ll be in a sealed carriage. Follow me without talking. No discussions. Time is of the essence.” He took them to his house at San Polo and hid them. The Camerino family was later able to escape to Switzerland and safety.

The uncertainties of the war period were the probable reason for a Ligabue corporate reorganisation: in July 1944 the individual company Anacleto Ligabue was transformed into a limited company. The executive positions were distributed among Anacleto’s closest collaborators and his sons-in law, while he only kept a more marginal role for himself. This prudent move was to prove invaluable when, a few months later, the rapid deterioration in events was in danger of

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War again

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Anacleto Ligabue

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Conditions for a contract with the shipowner Achille Lauro, Venice, 1943.

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The renewal of a contract with the Società di Navigazione Adriatica, Venice, 6 July 1943.

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La cambusa delle cambuse (Galley of galleys), published in 1956: the Ligabue warehouses offered an increasingly wide range of food supplies.

closing down the whole company. Meanwhile, it was decided to pay one month’s wages in advance to the thirty-seven employees so that they could stock up on supplies. In December 1944, the situation of the company’s books was defined as “satisfactory”, despite the fact that working involved “difficulties and risks of all kinds”. A list from this time of 132 contracted ships is completely unrealistic: those vessels would have been largely out of service, requisitioned, bomb-damaged in ports, or sunk.

On 28 and 29 April 1945, allied troops entered Venice: Ligabue was about to experience its most difficult days. In a report to the board for that period, we read: “The arrival of peace was welcomed with enthusiastic demonstrations of joy, clouded, however, by the occupation of our warehouses by partisan groups, not always controlled, and then by the decision to place the company under an administrative commission of the CLN [National Liberation Committee].”

We need to read between the lines to understand what was happening: that “not always controlled” suggests that someone, out of control, had ransacked the warehouses, and in the meantime the company had been handed over to outside administrators. Many companies that had continued working during the Social Republic had been requisitioned, while investigations were underway to make sure that owners or managers had not colluded with the Fascist regime. Those three months (mid-May to mid-August 1945) turned out to be very damaging.

The Allied Command put an end to the requisition, calling it illegal. But, in the meantime, business had stopped and no relations had been established with the new port authorities, which had taken over from the Republicans. Things, however, were not settled, because the commissioner, although stripped of power, continued to work in the name of Ligabue, in parallel and unbeknown to the company executives. Indeed on 11 August 1946, the allied military government had to order the self-styled commissioner to cease all action, or be given an exemplary punishment by the Allied Military Tribunal.

The change to a limited company a couple of years earlier proved to be of vital importance in once more placing the company under the control of its managers, although what they found was basically an empty box. With looted warehouses, ships sunk or damaged, on-board and office staff reduced to a minimum, and the management in the hands of an illegitimate commissioner, the Ligabue company had to start from scratch again. But Anacleto was not a man to be discouraged, and he was fond of saying that having got through the difficult post-war period was like being born again.

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The first conveyor elevator was installed in a Naples warehouse, 1956.

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Italo Giambra, head of production for foreign ship supply, in the late 1960s.

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Goods being taken out of the Punto Franco bonded warehouse at San Basilio, Venice, 1970.

Anacleto Ligabue

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The post-war recovery

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Goods being loaded onto lorries at the Punto Franco warehouse, 1970.

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Food supplies being loaded onto a ship in the port of Trieste, 1970.

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Postcards of the Flotta Lauro ships Roma and Sydney, and the Andrea Gritti, owned

by Sidarma, 1940.

In 1946, the Ligabue warehouses were requisitioned by the Allies and the offices were temporarily moved to the upper floor of the restaurant-bar in Piazzale Roma.

Defeated Italy was left with almost no merchant ships, and so Ligabue had no contracts. The financial year closed at a loss, slightly mitigated by the fact that in the last few months a very timid recovery seemed to be underway. The Marshall Plan, promoted by the Americans to get Europe back on its feet, also involved selling at particularly favourable prices Liberty-class merchant ships, the vessels launched in the United States at the rate of one a day to transport troops and materials to Europe.

The recovery was difficult, but constant: in January 1948, Ligabue won contracts for about fifty ships, the largest group (of twenty-three) being for Flotta Lauro. Meanwhile, the company pulled out of Brindisi, and opened a new branch in Genoa. Italy at that time was making a huge effort to get back on its feet and shipping resorted to the vessels sold by the Americans; others, sunk in the ports, were literally pulled up out of the sludge, thanks to the work of legendary divers, others still were patched up in the shipyards. But ships were sailing again and Ligabue was catering for their crews. There was such an upsurge in emigration in those years that it became a crucial factor in the revival of Italian commercial shipping.

Passenger ships couldn’t meet the demand and so shipowners set up large, uncomfortable crowded rooms on merchant ships to enable emigrants to cross the oceans. Italians emigrated to the Americas, South Africa and Australia. On board the ships that took them so far, they ate what Ligabue served from the galleys. The ships included three Flotta Lauro vessels (the Roma, Surriento and Sydney), which brought back cargoes of frozen meat to replenish Anacleto’s warehouses, thus enabling him to build a considerable competitive advantage.

In 1949, the number of ships contracted to Ligabue rose to fifty-nine. They belonged to the leading shipowners of the day: Sidarma, Lauro, Adriatica and Tripcovich. A Ligabue branch was opened in Trieste: it was based in Warehouse 18 of the old port. Anacleto kept faith with his original philosophy: always aim for high quality. In a letter to the staff on ships, he called for diligence and professionalism: “We prefer good cooks and bad accountants, to good accountants and bad cooks”.

This statement is even more forceful, if we bear in mind that the crews on ships at the time were about twice as numerous as today.

More new branches were opened, and the number of contracted ships grew: in 1951 there were 92, owned by 21 different shipowners, with a total of 243 staff on board (chief stewards, cooks, galley workers and kitchen boys); three years later the figure was 96 ships. But it was only in 1956, when the contracted ships reached 141, that the situation of 1943 was surpassed.

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The Angela Germana, owned by Gruppo Onorato, in the Bacino di San Marco, 1940s.

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The Giovanni Grimaldi, owned by Gruppo Grimaldi, 1950s.

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The Silvia Onorato, a Gruppo Onorato ship, 1950s.

Anacleto Ligabue

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The Anna Maria d’Amico. The Gruppo d’Amico ship’s catering had been contracted to Ligabue since 1949.

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The Città di Salerno, a Gruppo d’Amico ship.

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The Imperia, a Gruppo Grimaldi ship served

by Ligabue.

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In a 1950 publication, the Ligabue company described itself with justifiable pride as offering “the only complete organisation of maritime provisioning” in Italy and abroad. The large Venice warehouse was nicknamed the “Galley of galleys”.

As we have seen, since the 1950s, the entire La Grande dairy cooperative production had been bought in bulk by Ligabue, and the cheese forms were stamped with the Ligabue brand. “Villa Argine cheeses sail across the oceans” was the headline of a local newspaper report; the accompanying photos show long shelves of rows of black forms (at the time carbon black was used to seal them).

Large maturing rooms were laid out to hold cured meats and cheeses. Ligabue toasted and packed its own coffee, and bottled wine from Cyprus. All the products were carefully checked by analysing them in a laboratory located inside the warehouses. There was a vast selection of tobaccos of every type and origin. Even the packaging was labelled with the Ligabue symbol, as evidenced by the flexographic plates (still kept in the archives) used to stamp it on boxes.

Business was growing and a location for new headquarters was being considered as early as 1951. The following year a building site was chosen and in 1953 the new headquarters were opened. The new offices were situated very close to the old Santa Chiara headquarters but, so to speak, “one floor further up”, in the sense that they were located at the end of the Ponte della Libertà, raised on the access ramp to the Piazzale Roma car terminal. It was a particularly striking, innovative building for the time, and still exists today, although now converted to other uses. It was designed in Rationalist style by architect Carlo Cristofori. The news of the opening was reported by Il Gazzettino of 28 May 1953. After providing an endless list of participants (all cited with title and surname, as was the custom at the time), the newspaper mentions that to construct the new building they had to overcome some remarkable technical difficulties, “which had discouraged previous attempts”.

The ground floor housed the national warehouses, while the offices were on the first floor. Lifts, elevators and cranes moved people and goods. The Punto Franco bonded warehouses are still in operation as a temporary deposit for foodstuffs before they are loaded on board. This was an important novelty, at the time unprecedented, at least in Italy. Keeping goods in the pre-customs Punto Franco warehouses meant avoiding importing and then re-exporting foodstuffs, with all the related extras in terms of costs and bureaucracy: another innovative idea from Anacleto Ligabue that brought a further competitive advantage.

Anacleto Ligabue

The new headquarters in Piazzale Roma

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Elevation of the new Ligabue Building in Piazzale Roma; the warehouses were to be dubbed the Cambusa delle cambuse (Galley of galleys), 1950.

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The Ligabue Building in Piazzale Roma in 1955 with Cambusa delle cambuse handwritten above the water entrance.

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The journalists of the time waxed enthusiastically and, in addition to describing the new headquarters (“looking fresh and cheerful”, according to one reporter), they also provided a portrait of the man in charge of the company. Anacleto Ligabue “works eighteen hours a day, rushing between Venice, Naples, Genoa and Trieste”.

He takes care of everything: prices, quality of goods and warehouse organisation, while maintaining relationships with suppliers and correspondents and making everything run like clockwork, with no delays and hitches. “Our interview”, one reporter noted, “lasted exactly seven minutes and was interrupted by three phone calls, the arrival of a telegram, and the swift entry of his secretary for an urgent communication. Seven heady minutes, during which the commendator Ligabue made me feel dizzy.” Afterwards, he was going to accompany two people on a visit to the Punto Franco and then he would leave for Naples. High-powered business, no doubt about it. His contemporary acquaintances described him as a jovial man, naturally inclined to enjoy company.

His personality was pleasantly surprising for visitors but his warehouses were positively amazing: “the guest is astounded by the vast spaces and the enormous quantity of goods stored there”. “Ligabue-style eating” had become synonymous with well-being and high quality.

Anacleto used the “Galley of galleys” as a marketing tool: he took visitors – journalists, shipowners, captains, politicians, bankers or entrepreneurs – who were inevitably impressed. Enthusiastic comments can be found in the guest book and in letters, telegrams and cards from all over the world.

By the late 1950s, the vessels contracted included passenger ships, ferries, merchant ships and mixed ships transporting both goods and passengers. Just to give an idea, the three Lauro transatlantic liners carried, on average, around 100 first-class and 800 second- and third-class passengers. This meant that, on these ships alone, over 3,000 main meals were served (breakfast, lunch, dinner) every day, without counting snacks and night meals and that the crew obviously also had to be fed. An enormous amount of food had to be stored and moved to replenish the galleys.

Some of the new customers included the ships of Navarma, founded by Achille Onorato, from the homonymous family of shipowners (now Onorato Armatori, owner of Moby, Tirrenia and Toremar). The current chairman, Vincenzo Onorato, relates an episode from that time: “Immediately after the Second World War, my father had recovered a bombed ship from the seabed. It took great expense, blood and sacrifices to do so.

The catering on board was entrusted to a Venetian gentleman

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Perspective view of the Ligabue Building at Piazzale Roma, used from 1953 to 2015.

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Anacleto Ligabue was made a Cavaliere del Lavoro (Knight of the Order of Merit for Labour) by the Italian president Giuseppe Saragat in 1970.

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The painting behind Anacleto Ligabue in the Piazzale Roma headquarters depicts Venice from antiquity to the present day, 1970.

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The Minister of Industry, Giulio Andreotti, visits Ligabue, accompanied

by Anacleto and Giancarlo, 1967.

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An article in Corriere della Sera of 26 November 1970 describes Ligabue as “the largest international catering company”.

Anacleto Ligabue

called Anacleto Ligabue. The ship then sank after disastrously splitting in two over the Dover shoals. My father told Ligabue that he had lost everything and that he had no money left to pay him. He confessed that he hadn’t even insured the ship because he had run out of funds. He had used up all his possessions and more to get her sailing again. ‘We’ll recoup our losses together, Achilles, we’ll recoup them’, was the Venetian gentleman’s reply. Other times, other men, other seas.”

Meanwhile, the Ligabue company built new offices for the agencies in Trieste, Genoa and Naples. It updated its transport vehicle fleet and hired new specialised personnel, both on land and at sea.

The 1960s brought the economic boom and for Ligabue, too, it was a time of fast growth, both in terms of contracts and ship supply. Here we need a word of explanation for non-experts. We have already seen what the maritime contracts involved: the Venetian company took on the responsibility of the galley and the on-board kitchen staff. Ship supply, on the other hand, is the straightforward sale of foodstuffs to international shipowners. In those years, Ligabue’s business was roughly equally divided between the two sectors, but it must be stressed that the company’s strength lay precisely in not rigidly compartmentalising the various branches of business, but in creating a form of osmosis capable of dealing with the area where there was most need at any given time. Today this is called flexibility, but the word was not yet fashionable in those days.

In the early 1960s, Ligabue and the Genoese company Barbagelata founded a joint company specifically for foreign customers, named International Ship Supplies United Enterprises (ISSUE). The company was initially based in Genoa and then, from 1963 onwards, in Venice, under the guidance of Giancarlo Ligabue. A multilingual staff was hired to communicate with the ships in all their ports of residence.

Ligabue handled the galley requirements, while Barbagelata saw to equipment and deck supplies. The businesses complemented each other and, in theory, everything should have gone smoothly, but in the early days it was an uphill struggle. At the time, foreign shipowners considered Italian suppliers to be unprofessional and consequently not very reliable. The joint company, therefore, had to offer impeccable services and build up a reputation. The venture was successful, thanks to a careful step-by-step policy and periodical visits to shipowners’ offices all over the globe aimed at gaining their trust. Things all worked out for the best, high sales volumes were achieved and, in some cases, supply agreements were transformed by Ligabue into catering contracts, while a network of procuring agents was set up in the most important maritime centres. The joint company was closed, however, in the year 2000. Ship supply is still an important segment of the group’s activities. Currently it also has some branches abroad (Rotterdam) that provide machinery and deck supplies.

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Anacleto Ligabue, vice-chairman of the Venice Provincial Committee of the Italian Red Cross, visits the Venetian Red Cross Alpine summer camp at Enego, 1964.

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The official opening of the Casa della Carità home for the elderly, named after Anacleto’s mother, Carolina, at Villa Argine (Reggio Emilia) in 1961.

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Anacleto Ligabue with some students at the Giorgio Cini Professional Institute for Seafaring Activities, 1955; Ligabue provided a chef and food for the canteen.

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The Villa Argine ACLI club, a recreational and cultural centre built by Anacleto Ligabue, 1958.

The Veneto has a long tradition of enlightened capitalism, and the housing that Anacleto Ligabue built for his employees can be seen in that perspective. The 1950s saw the fast development of Porto Marghera, Venice’s industrial district and, consequently, large immigration flows. There was a demand for workers and many people urgently sought houses in the area. Rents were shooting up and those with limited financial resources had to live increasingly farther away. The biggest companies, firstly Montevecchio (part of the Montecatini group), with the Sartori Village, and Chiari & Forti had housing specially built for employees. Ligabue followed suit: in the early 1950s the Ligabue Village was built in the Altobello area in Mestre and still survives today. The around thirty apartments are divided between several buildings and were assigned to the employees who applied for accommodation. The formula was that of a mortgage: by paying a monthly sum instead of rent, after a certain number of years, the tenants became the owners.

Anacleto took good care of his employees. He always called them “collaborators” and demanded that they be polite to customers, but also expected the same from the customers: he wouldn’t have hesitated to lose a customer who had mistreated one of his collaborators. There was, however, little need to resort to such extremes.

He sent his middle managers to study abroad and funded vocational training courses, especially in the constantly changing field of customs regulations. He sometimes organised trips combining leisure and learning, such as when he himself went on a cruise along with 160 employees to Spalato (now Split) on the Yugoslavian ship Jadran, to learn about the port system of the country on the other side of the Adriatic.

He also forged relations with Dalmatian maritime companies and established twinning with Venice by taking two famous gondoliers and champion rowers, Ciaci and Strigheta, across the Adriatic.

Ligabue included a “punctuality bonus” in the employees’ pay slip, so that everything would run as smooth as clockwork in the scheduled times, and there would be no hitches in getting supplies to ships that only stopped over for a few days and in some cases only a few hours. He also offered a loyalty bonus: increases in salary after ten, twenty and twenty-five years in the company, highlighted by celebrations for long-service staff with special awards. Not surprisingly, jobs at Ligabue were greatly in demand.

The executives included the husbands of two of Anacleto’s daughters: Franco Piloni, manager of the Punto Franco warehouses and all the customs operations; and Giuseppe Poli, administrative and financial director. Anacleto also relied on what we might now call a lobbyist, an independent consultant who handled relations with the Ministries in Rome in order to monitor the bureaucratic issues related to changes in regulations. The results of this kind of work benefited all Italian maritime suppli-

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ers gathered in the Anpan (National Association of Maritime Supplier Contractors), of which Anacleto was honorary president, having promoted and co-founded the association in 1970.

Caring about social problems 62

Celebrations for the return to Serie A of Venezia Calcio in 1961; Anacleto Ligabue was vice-chairman of the football club.

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The Patriarch of Venice, Giovanni Urbani, at the landing stage of the Ligabue headquarters, Venice, 1960.

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Vittorio Cini showing Anacleto Ligabue round the Foundation dedicated to the memory of his son Giorgio on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, 1955.

Anacleto Ligabue

A valid entrepreneur is judged not only by his sales volume, but also by the welfare activities he promotes and the profits he reinvests in charitable associations and good works. In the family history of Zita and Anacleto, some of their benevolent activities have been highlighted, whereas others are little known. The Ligabue archives preserves a letter of 1957 from the patriarch of Venice, Angelo Roncalli, future Pope John XXIII, thanking Zita and Anacleto for their donation in favour of the Pius XII Institute, which had taken over the Grand Hotel on Lake Misurina to convert it into a tubercular prevention centre for children. The couple were among the great benefactors of this sanatorium, still open today (it is the large building with the lake in the background that can be seen on all the postcards). Now it is the only mountain centre in Italy specialised in the treatment and rehabilitation of children and adolescents with respiratory diseases.

Ligabue returned to Villa Argine every year. He used to give the children school materials and gifts as well as providing new furnishings for the whole primary school.

He made donations to the parish and local families; a gold bracelet was the prize in an annual draw for young brides. Zita and Anacleto also restored the church, contributed to the construction of the parish recreation centre and presented the village with a large bronze statue of the Madonna to be placed on top of the bell tower to protect the whole community.

Abundant Christmas gift boxes of delicacies for every employee were eagerly awaited. In 1958 Anacleto took 150 employees (they came from Venice, Naples, Trieste and Genoa) to Villa Argine in three coaches for two days, arousing the enthusiasm of the local press. These trips were not just convivial: the employees visited the places of production and seasoning of cured meats and Parmesan cheese, products they had read about so many times on the bills of lading for food supplies.

On that same occasion, the company marking up its 200th contracted ship (it was actually already 202). During the celebrations in Reggio Emilia, the employees presented Anacleto with a gold model of a sixteenth-century Venetian cargo ship. The entrepreneur announced in his speech of thanks that from that year onwards staff would receive an extra half month’s pay for the summer holidays, this anticipated the full month’s holiday bonus in the commercial sector introduced in the national unions’ contract several years later.

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In 1961, Zita and Anacleto opened the Casa della Carità, a home for elderly dependents still in operation today, dedicated to Anacleto’s mother, Carolina.

Anacleto had also helped the Scilla Institute for war orphans, which also functioned as a hotel and restaurant school within the Giorgio Cini Professional Institute for Seafaring Activities, known in Venice as a “the cadet sailors’ school”. He provided the food used in cooking lessons, supervised by a Ligabue chef.

Collaboration with Enrico Mattei’s Eni 65

Ligabue employees setting off on a trip offered by the company to mark its 50th anniversary in 1969.

We have already seen how, even before the war, the ships contracted to Ligabue included the Sergio Laghi, owned by Agip, one of the few vessels spared by the events. In 1952, Agip joined the Eni group of companies, chaired by Enrico Mattei.

Since the early 1950s, he had ordered the construction of ten oil tankers and, a decade later, the group had around twenty ships. Having won the contract for them, Ligabue opened an agency in Augusta, the city where Eni was based in Sicily, and then he set up a new company there to provide the supplies and manage the catering not only on ships but also on oil platforms in the Mediterranean. This activity was expanded internationally by Giancarlo Ligabue and is still a sector of primary importance for international growth alongside large companies.

The 1960s saw the sudden, rapid development of commercial aviation. Ligabue equipped itself to supply passenger planes and took over the management of the bar, restaurant and canteen of the new Venice airport, Marco Polo, recently built at Tessera, on the edge of the lagoon.

Anacleto also took a passionate interest in the world of sport and was, for example, president of the Bucintoro Royal Rowing Society. In the 1960-61 season, he was appointed the president-commissioner (external administrator) of Venezia football team, and then, the following year, vice-president together with Enrico Linetti, while the president was Count Giovanni Volpi di Misurata.

Under their management, in 1961, Venezia returned to Serie A, the top flight, after many years.

In 1969 the Ligabue company celebrated fifty years of business. It had 300 ships under contract and Anacleto, in the meantime, had been made a Cavaliere del Lavoro (Order of Merit for Labour), and was affectionately called the “Grande cambusiere” (the Great Galley Chief) or “El Leon” (the Lion) in Venetian. That year the company had a stand at the first international maritime fair, called Posidonia. Held in Athens, it attracted shipowners and operators from all over the world. The Ligabue employees were flown out to the fair on an Alitalia plane hired for the purpose. At that time, Ligabue Hellas was established in Piraeus

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to support both the procurement and the supply sectors. This was a significant move from an operational and promotional point of view.

In 1970, the International Ship Suppliers Association (ISSA) held its annual congress in Venice. It was attended by all the major suppliers worldwide, including the Japanese giant Fuji Trading, led by its founder Chuhei Koike. While in Venice, he asked to spend two days in the Ligabue warehouses and offices to learn how the work was organised by what he had heard was the best maritime supplier worldwide.

Anacleto’s son Giancarlo had already joined him in the company ten years earlier, and was by now vice-chairman of the Board of Directors. He immediately showed his commercial skills and began further developing foreign markets and internationalising the company.

When Anacleto died on 27 July 1971, Giancarlo was ready for the new challenges of the world market awaiting him.

Anacleto and Zita are buried at Villa Argine, near the church, the Madonna of the village and the Casa della CaritĂ , in their native land of Reggio Emilia, which now embraces them forever.

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Anacleto Ligabue

Enrico Mattei, chairman of Eni, in front of an aircraft with the Eni symbol and, in the background, a Ligabue hangar: the two companies had recently begun to collaborate, 1952.

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Massimo Casarin

Giancarlo Ligabue 89

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Anacleto Ligabue with his son and heir, Giancarlo, in the Palazzo Erizzo, 1965.

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A leaflet advertising Ligabue Hasani, the company branch in the United Arab Emirates, 1975.

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A leaflet advertising Ligabue Panama, the company branch in Colón, on the Atlantic side of the Panama Canal, 1976.

La grande impresa

iancarlo Ligabue had been working in the company for many years.

After having studied in the United States and at Ca’ Foscari University, Venice, he had already gained considerable experience alongside his father Anacleto. His first important mission took him to Australia in 1959. He was 28 when he set off from Italy with the Ligabue purchasing manager, Renato Allegrini. They were going to Australia to negotiate with some frozen meat producers. The mission went very smoothly, resulting in an agreement being signed with the Jackson company, whose owners repaid the visit in Venice the following year.

The mission in Australia was not particularly memorable for the business deal: that everything should go for the best had not been taken for granted, but was expected. The unexpected, however, is always lurking and they ran into a mishap in the shape of a storm that forced their small chartered plane to make an emergency landing. The expert pilot successfully brought the plane down without any harm being done to those on board, except for one person: Allegrini came home with his hair bleached white.

Giancarlo started out in his father’s company by selecting firms for a network of trusted suppliers for ships contracted in various ports around the world. It might be said that from that moment onwards (1960), the real international expansion of the company got underway. Everything had to work smoothly: the service had to be reliable and the goods standardised so as to guarantee the best supplies in any part of the world.

An article in Corriere della Sera of November 1970 gave a good portrait of the Ligabue company and its maritime catering business: “First of all, what is catering? It is the overall provision of supplies and services for everything you need aboard a ship, or a plane, to feed the passengers and crew. From breakfast to dinner, from an aperitif to a midnight snack, with all the necessary training and use of personnel of cooks, galley staff, waiters, chefs, chief steward, butchers, bakers, pastry chefs, house and room stewards; mountains of food, rivers of drinks of all kinds, and an army of specialised personnel. All this is catering. Basically, to summarise: all this is what constitutes the work of Ligabue from Venice.”

The company archives preserve “A Small Cookbook for the Crew Cafeteria”, reprinted in 1971, and edited by Ettore Giraldi, the head chef at Lloyd Triestino, one of the shipowners supplied by the Venetian company.

Meanwhile, Ligabue had reached an agreement for the creation of its own depot in Port Said, on the Suez Canal, to supply ships sailing in both directions but which didn’t stop off in Italy.

The cargo ships sector continued to develop, and the Venetian company won the

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catering services for numerous fleets of the most disparate nationalities, which meant having to adapt supplies to provide typical local products. The most important overseas customers were shipping companies such as Naess Shipping, New York, the London-based Overseas Maritime Company, Olympic Maritime, (Aristotle Onassis’s Monte Carlo company) and Energy Transportation, requiring the presence of a Ligabue inspector in Japan.

1971 marked the end of an era: the age of the gold standard, or of the convertibility of paper currency into gold. In Europe it had long been abolished, and its demise in the United States was decreed on 15 August 1971. At the end of the year, the Ligabue Board of Directors made the following statement: “The cancellation of the dollar gold convertibility and the imposition of a 10 percent surcharge on US imports announced by Washington have created a dramatic revaluation of European currencies and the almost total inaccessibility of the American market.”

Political events also affected economic life and, from 1967 to 1975, the Suez Canal remained closed. The cause was the Six Day War, unleashed by the Arabs, that ended with the Israeli occupation of the Sinai Peninsula. At that point

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Some of the products included in ship supplies had the Ligabue brand mark, 1970.

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Ligabue roasted its own brand of coffee and packaged it in polyethylene bags, 1965.

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The Navarino, owned by Karageorgis; the ship’s catering was handled

by Ligabue, 1976.

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A barge with Ligabue lorries and personnel crossing the Bacino di San Marco in Venice, 1970.

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Giancarlo Ligabue

Ligabue brand coffee packaged and ready for the international market, 1965.

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The Deutschland in 1998, a ship owned by Peter Deilmann, who had already signed a contract with Ligabue in the 1980s.

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A cruise ship moored in Venice; Ligabue managed its kitchen and dining-room staff, 1985.

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The Agip Lazio, a tanker launched at Monfalcone in 1976 and supplied

by Ligabue, 1985.

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The Achille Lauro; Flotta Lauro ships in transit through the Panama Canal were handled by the local Ligabue branch office, 1985.

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The Costa Cruises ship Danae, on which the collaboration between Ligabue and the chef Alfredo Beltrame, owner of the El ToulĂ restaurants, was sealed, 1984.

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The ribbon of the Grand Officer of the Order for Merit of Labour of the Italian Republic awarded to Giancarlo Ligabue

by Italian president, Giorgio Napolitano, 21 May 2007.

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The cover of the December issue of Fortune dedicated to Giancarlo Ligabue and his catering company, 1975.

Giancarlo Ligabue

the canal became the very high voltage border between Egypt and Israel and stayed closed until the Israelis withdrew in keeping with the peace agreements.

Maritime traffic, however, could not be halted for eight years and therefore sea routes underwent radical changes. With the Suez Canal closed, some ships made up time by passing through the Panama Canal. To meet their requirements, the Venetian society opened a branch, Ligabue Zona Libre, in the port of Colón, at the Atlantic end of the canal.

At that time two important passenger ships belonging to the Flotta Lauro company often passed through the Panama Canal: the Angelina and the Achille Lauro.

Meanwhile, Ligabue had also been contracted by the Società Italia di Navigazione to supply its jewel, the flagship, Michelangelo (in active service until in 1975) and two Lloyd Trieste transatlantic liners: the Leonardo da Vinci and the Galileo Galilei.

Later, the Vistamar was the first cruise ship fully managed by Ligabue, that is to say in all on-board services, except for those required for navigation.

The minutes of a Board of Directors meeting of 18 March 1971 record a ground-breaking event for Ligabue, even though, in all likelihood, no one was fully aware of its importance at the time: the arrival of the first computer. The increased expenses compared to the previous financial year were “mainly due to the purchase of a Philips computer”. Of course, at the time, the cost was exorbitant.

In 1973, Giancarlo Ligabue officially founded the Ligabue Research and Study Centre (now a Foundation). In autumn 1974, the company opened the world’s largest refrigerated warehouse for maritime supplies in the port of Trieste. It could hold up to 1,200 tons of meat. These were actually difficult years, but despite spiralling costs due to the oil crisis, the company continued to invest, confident that better times were just round the corner.

In addition to its facilities in Venice, in the rest of Italy, Ligabue could rely on warehouses in Trieste, Naples, Genoa and Ravenna, while worldwide the most important were those in Dubai and Panama. The distribution system could count on 140 company trucks and boats in Italy. Wine arrived on barges and was stored in cement barrels before being loaded aboard in large plastic containers or already bottled; oil was stored in twenty-kilo tin drums, while before being taken on ship, coffee was blended, roasted and packed in special polyethylene containers, first used by Ligabue.

Increasing costs sent old-fashioned ships out of business, mainly due to the disproportionate ratio of staff to passengers. The Venetian company Adriatica had to sell three ships: the Enotria, the Messapia and the Illyria.

In December 1975, Giancarlo Ligabue received a major acknowledgement: he was featured on the cover of Fortune, the celebrated American business mag-

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In March 1977, Giancarlo Ligabue was made a Knight of the Royal Order of the Polar Star of Sweden; earlier in the month he had been appointed Honorary Consul of Sweden.

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When the Queen Mother visited Venice aboard the Royal Yacht Britannia in 1984, Ligabue provided the food.

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azine. In a ten-page article inside, entitled “The Extraordinary Venetian Who Feeds the Ships at Sea”, the journalist claims: “Giancarlo Ligabue has made his firm the largest ship caterer in the world… At forty-four, Giancarlo Ligabue is almost certainly the most energetic [man in Venice].” The article then goes on to list all of Giancarlo’s activities: he runs the business first hand, takes part in archaeological digs in Africa and Asia, writes books, is reorganising a natural history museum, is president of the Venice basketball team and Honorary Consul of Sweden. Moreover, he even has time to be hugely friendly not only with clients, employees and fellow palaeontologists, but also with writers, artists and musicians. Fortune then claimed that Giancarlo Ligabue had coined a neologism, “gastropsychology” and illustrated the term by pointing to the key importance of the sequence in which dishes are served for the purpose of keeping a tight budget. The journalist visited the Venetian warehouse where 1,800 different foodstuffs were stored and he was mightily impressed.

In 1978, Giancarlo met Sylvia Granier, a beautiful Bolivian, in Rome.

In 1981, Giancarlo’s son Inti was born but his mother, Sylvia, tragically died when he was just sixteen. Giancarlo became a father at the age of fifty, and this factor was to have a bearing on Inti’s education: even as a child, he went with his father on some expeditions.

Meanwhile, fresh water was added to seawater, i.e. cruises on the Danube. Since the 1980s, they had become increasingly popular and made use of classy ships, such as the Donauprinzessin, owned by Peter Deilmann and the Mozart. For this business, an office was opened in Salzburg with the task of selecting and hiring on-board staff. It was a successful move and, indeed, shortly afterwards a joint company was created by Ligabue and the Austrian state river navigation company. The Salzburg office also recruited personnel for stateowned Austrian vessels, and an Italian restaurant was opened in the river port of Vienna.

The cruise industry began to pick up again thanks to new ships and new management criteria. In May 1984, on board the Costa ship the Danae in the Bacino di San Marco in Venice, Ligabue forged an alliance was with Alfredo Beltrame, one of the most important chefs of the day and the celebrated owner of the El Toulà chain of restaurants and hotels. His ideas had radically changed the previously very traditional on-board cooking. A “colour menu” was prepared, an absolute novelty for the time: red to give security, yellow for calm, and white for spirituality, while dark red stood for the Renaissance.

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El Toulà chefs on board the Costa Crociera, 1984.

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An American Express advertisement showing Giancarlo Ligabue sipping coffee, seated on top of a mohai on Easter Island, 1987.

Giancarlo Ligabue

Ligabue and Costa wanted to renew the on-board cuisine by avoiding the previous practice of precooking. To do this, fresh food was brought aboard in every port of call. This enabled El Toulà to develop 200 recipes of different dishes for the on-board chefs. The successful experiment was repeated on the Danae cruises in Japan.

By 1984 Ligabue was supplying 30 passenger ships and 280 merchant vessels a total of 13 million meals a year; the figure rises to 20 million, if we include construction sites, airports and oil platforms.

In autumn the same year, Venice welcomed an illustrious visitor: the British Queen Mother, who arrived on board the Royal Yacht Britannia. Ligabue provided the supplies and, once the visit was over, the company received a flattering letter: “The daily supplies of the various provisions always arrived on time, which is a blessing, and the service was always superb.”

Unfortunately, as often happens, there were also periods of crisis, such as the downturn in the mid-1980s. In fact, when the Suez Canal was reopened, the shipowners decommissioned the supertankers (200-300,000 tonnes) that had been used when shipping was forced to circumnavigate Africa. Now they had become unmanageable giants: for example, the daily cost of one supertanker was the equivalent of around thirty traditional tankers. More and more ships were withdrawn and this dragged some companies into bankruptcy, such as the Flotta Lauro and the Japanese Sanko Line. In the first case, given the good personal relationship between the sons of the founders, Ercole and Giancarlo, Ligabue didn’t take legal action against Lauro to collect its outstanding credit, or attempt to have its vessels confiscated. In the second situation, the Japanese company owed Ligabue large sums and many of its 120 ships still called into Italian ports. Timeliness was essential: a lightning trip to Tokyo and two long meetings with the Sanko executives led to the immediate payment of 88 percent of the credit, before the ships in Italian ports would be impounded by order of seizure.

There was, however, an inevitable, harsh restructuring of the company in 1986, conducted wisely without engendering strikes or similar protests.

But already by the following year, there were signs of a recovery and a return to profits on the balance sheet, with a further rise in 1988.

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The fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) had almost immediate repercussions. The following year Ligabue was called on to manage two Russian cruise ships, the Kazakhstan and the Azerbaijan, based in Odessa on the Black Sea; there was also a contract to supply a former German Democratic Republic ship, the Arkona. This was the first time that a Western company handled the on-board services previously dealt with directly by the Soviet state ownership. Ligabue was also entrusted with the services for Piotr I, a large floating Russian ophthalmic clinic, moored in Dubai, where trachoma operations were carried out (the disease affects most of the population of Saudi Arabia). It was Ligabue’s first experience of this kind: the operating theatres, with up to six teams of surgeons working simultaneously, occupied almost half of the deck; the patients and their carers amounted to 400 passengers. “It wasn’t just a question of regularly providing high-quality meals for the Russian personnel and their Arab guests, but also of complying to a series of hygienic and sanitary regulations,” Giancarlo Ligabue commented.

The policy of high-quality paid dividends: in November 1990 the ship’s kitchen of the German passenger ship the Berlin was awarded the Cordon Bleu prize. The shipowner was that same Peter Deilmann, whom we met a little earlier on the subject of cruises on the Danube. The Berlin, on the other hand, was seafaring and carried 400 guests (90 percent German) and 200 crew members. The award celebrations took place in Venice, to underline the importance of the catering by Ligabue. Things were beginning to change in the catering business and the on-board chef also offered diet menus. On a two-week cruise, the Berlin consumed: 20 quintals of meat (1 quintal = 100 kg), 6 quintals of poultry, 8 quintals of fish, 3 quintals of shellfish, 13 quintals of flour, 22 quintals of vegetables, 20 quintals of potatoes, 15,500 eggs, 14,500 sandwiches and 4,000 bottles of wine.

In 1993, a new company was created in Greece, this time with the shipping group Chandris, based in Piraeus, for the management of the ships the Azur and the Viktoria. Of course, the Italian market was still very important and collaborations were consolidated with the major ferry companies: Tirrenia, Moby Lines, D’Amico and Grimaldi.

At this time, there had been a heady rise in the related sector of on-board shops. Ligabue already managed the duty-free shops in some Italian airports and on numerous passenger ships. Now it acquired the commercial activities on board some large cruise ships based in Miami. As a result, a manager was sent to Florida also to deal with hiring catering staff.

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The Berlin, with ship’s catering by Ligabue, was awarded the Cordon Bleu prize on 5 November 1990.

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Giancarlo Ligabue with some of his collaborators in the Piazzale Roma headquarters, 1975.

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Giancarloligabue, Anacleto Ligabueil fondatore (18941971)

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An Eni oil prospecting rig in the desert near the city of Tarfaya, Morocco, 1960.

Oil platforms and construction sites The 1960s saw the beginning of a period of great diversification. There were no longer just ships at sea to be supplied, but also a growing number of prospecting and drilling platforms. The journal of the Italian energy workers’ union published an on-board log from the Scarabeo II platform in March 1975. In addition to the seventy-five Saipem employees there was a team of twelve Ligabue personnel. The language of the log seems rather quaint today: “in the name of elementary class solidarity, it seems only right also to speak of them [the Ligabue employees]”. The work of the Ligabue team, however, was considered to be useful because “in the canteen, living room and lodgings, the technicians are given the objective possibility of discharging the tension accumulated in the fifteen-day shift on the platform”.

Oil prospecting was not only taking place at sea, but also on land, and Ligabue began to provide supplies to onshore fields and the great international building sites run by leading Italian construction companies.

A new independent structure was created within the Venetian company to deal with “full catering” in the onshore sectors. The term “full catering” encompassed all the services involved in serving meals to staff, in addition to hotel and logistics services.

More than ever before, it was now imperative that Ligabue internationalise. The company thus proceeded to build up a supply network in the far-flung places

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A Ligabue Off Shore Department publication addressed to oil platform managers, 1975.

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The pages of the Ligabue Off Shore Department publication illustrating how catering is organised, 1975.

Giancarlo Ligabue

In the mid-1990s, some important agreements were signed. A contract with the German shipowner Ahrenkiel led to the opening of a branch in Cyprus to supply twenty-five ships of the Hamburg-based company. Ligabue soon also won the tenders for around fifty ships belonging to other shipping companies. In 1995, a Venetian manager was installed in Manila to manage two passenger ships which sailed to the Far East, flying the Norwegian and Filipino flags, respectively.

In the meantime, and we have now reached 1994, Giancarlo Ligabue had been elected to the European Parliament. For a couple of years, until 1996, he was also president of the Forza Italia parliamentary group. Given his company commitments, however, at the end of his term in office, he decided not to stand again.

The Venetian company’s reach had now been extended as far as the Far East: in autumn 1996, Ligabue Philippines (a catering staff of 55) was jointly founded in Manila with a local shipowner to supply the Mabuhay-Sunshine.

At the end of 1997, the maritime sector was by far largest part of Ligabue’s overall business, with two-thirds of the customer portfolio, while air catering accounted for the rest of the group’s activities.

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Giancarlo Ligabue

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The booklet ...where geologists go... illustrates catering services for difficult, remote areas, such as deserts, 1980.

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A Ligabue boat supplies Saipem’s Perro Negro platform off the coast of Ravenna, 1970.

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The Micoperi 7000 (today Saipem 7000), a semi-submersible crane vessel launched at Monfalcone, has a crew of 725 and two canteens, managed by Ligabue, 1987.

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The semi-submersible pipelay vessel Castoro Sei, launched at Trieste, has a crew of 347, 1980.

Giancarlo Ligabue

where it operated, by hiring local staff and creating new joint ventures with local partners.

The first important contract of this kind was signed with the Eni-Agip group in Comodoro Rivadavia (Patagonia), the main port for Argentina’s oil and oil-related exports. Shortly afterwards, Ligabue began to manage the catering for oil fields in the Zagros mountains in Iran. This business was to develop considerably for several decades. A joint company, ISASCO, was created with a local partner, chaired by Morteza Daftari, a retired admiral with aristocratic manners.

The new company landed an important contract working alongside the companies building the ports of Bandar Abbas and Khorramshahr; there were peaks of 20,000 workers of different ethnic groups with very varied dietary requirements and habits.

Satisfying the expectations of people so different from each other was very complicated and impossible only by sourcing products available on the Iranian market. The solution was to create a new provisioner within the company together with the owner of a supermarket chain. At the time, Dubai was not yet the world communications crossroad it has become today and, therefore, choosing it as the base for business in that world region was a remarkable piece of foresight. The fact there were no customs duties or special bureaucratic requirements was certainly an important factor and so it was quite natural to base the organisation of the supply system for Iran in Dubai. Supplies were shipped across the Persian Gulf on small boats.

At that time the United Arab Emirates was developing at great speed with construction projects, new industrial estates and oil prospecting. All this required logistical support and supplies which, of course, arrived by sea. Dozens and dozens of ships carrying all sorts of materials had to wait for weeks for their turn to be able to dock and unload their cargo.

Thanks to the Venetian parent company and good contacts with the shipowners, Ligabue won the contract to supply these ships. Sometimes they also had to cater for the spirit and not only the body as, for example, on New Year’s Eve in 1974, when the crews of forty ships waiting for their turn to dock for months were downhearted because they had been forced to stay on board during the festive season. Given this situation, the Ligabue Emirates employees – all polyglots – set about organising a sort of radio bingo, with prizes offered by the company. The initiative was enormously successful, boosting the morale of the crews and making Ligabue the talk of all the shipping companies – a much more effective ploy than a million-dollar marketing campaign.

In 1980, the Venetian company secured its largest contract ever, namely the

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An aerial view of Terra Nova Bay on the Ross Sea, Antarctica, where Ligabue managed the catering for an icebreaker and a logistics support vessel, 1985.

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The CNR science station at Terra Nova Bay, on the Ross Sea, Antarctica, hosted 250-300 researchers at a time, 1985.

daily supply of food to around 20,000 people working at Misrata in Libya, in what was then the biggest steel mill in the world. Owned by LISCO (Libyan Iron and Steel Company), the plant had been built by Austrians from Voestalpine, based in Linz, in collaboration with the German companies Krupp (steelworks) and Hochtief (construction). The workforce was largely Filipino, organised by the Galaxy company, which was controlled by some senior army officers close to the Philippines president, Ferdinand Marcos.

This contract demonstrates how important the synergies between Giancarlo Ligabue’s various activities were. The meeting between Ligabue and Marcos proved to be decisive both for the Study Centre’s scientific expeditions and for supplies in Libya. On one hand, the Philippines president instructed the Galaxy managing director to provide Giancarlo Ligabue with an armed forces helicopter to support the anthropological mission and, on the other, a preliminary exclusive agreement was signed to provide food supplies to the Libyan steel plant. The Study Centre expedition to the forests of the Philippines managed to study and document the existence of native groups that had had no previous contact with the outside world.

Moreover, Ligabue also gave a greatly appreciated lecture on paleontological topics to a packed audience at the University of Manila.

All this meant that an impressive flow of supplies started moving in the direction of Misrata: every month about forty chilled or normal 20 to 40-foot containers left for the Libyan city.

In the mid-1990s Ligabue arrived in Shenzhen, China: the Venetian company and Nanhai Oil, the state-owned oil company, set up a mixed public-private catering company to serve some drilling platforms in the South China Sea belonging to a consortium made up of Agip, Texaco and Mobil Oil. Antarctica Working in Antarctica was a completely new experience in a field outside of Ligabue’s traditional sectors of navigation and construction sites. This fascinating challenge came in 1985, when Ligabue worked alongside ENEA (then the Italian National Agency of Atomic Energy and Alternative Energy) to organise the catering for the first permanent Italian base in Antarctica. The science station, now named after Mario Zucchelli, its designer who died in 2003, is located in Terra Nova, on the Ross Sea, and was managed by the Italian National Research Council (CNR) and ENEA. This was obviously an extremely tough test and the Venetian company provided services for a Norwegian icebreaker and an Italian logistics support ship

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as well as the canteen of the land base, once it had been built, for 250-300 researchers. This was as totally new experience for the Ligabue company, which put together very useful films and written documents for subsequent Italian missions to the South Pole.

In 1988, Corriere della Sera interviewed engineer Mario Zucchelli on a satellite phone, while he was in Antarctica, shortly before returning to Italy at the end of his fourth mission. The scientist explained what daily life was like on the base and at one point added: “The temperature during our stay there can vary from a few degrees above zero to minus thirty. To combat this difficult situation, the food supplied by Ligabue guaranteed a supplement of about an extra thousand calories to the daily diet.” On the basis on this unusual experience, the Research and Study Centre promoted a scientific conference entitled: “Food in Remote Environments: the Case of the Antarctic”. As Giancarlo Ligabue explained: “The longer people are away from home, the more they eat sweet things. They miss their loved ones and regress to childhood. Food then becomes a psychological supplement.”

Sky high

In the 1990s, Sole (Ligabue owned 70 percent of the company) handled the catering of twenty airlines operating out of Venice and Treviso, for a total of about half a million meals per year. It also managed the duty-free shops in these two airports and in those of Bologna and Trieste. In early 1994, Ligabue won a contract to pro-

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A Ligabue vehicle supplies an Alitalia aircraft at Marco Polo airport, Venice, 1970.

Giancarlo Ligabue

It all started in the post-war period, when DC 3 Dakotas (often former military transport planes converted for civilian use) regularly landed on the grass runway of the Giovanni Nicelli airport on the Venice Lido. At that time fountain pens could not be taken on board because the cabins were unpressurised and the ink would have leaked, indelibly staining clothes. The Ligabue motorboat used to go out from Venice carrying olive and cheese sandwiches for the 4 or 5 passengers waiting for those flights.

About fifteen years on, in the mid-1960s, Ligabue acquired the company Sole, which managed airport shops and supplied meals to passengers on the various airlines operating out of Marco Polo airport in Venice. A few years later the company opened a large catering production centre near the airport.

In the mid-1980s, business at Marco Polo airport went through a period of crisis that led to a corporate reorganisation, but by 1986 a new Sole air-catering centre was opened and producing 5,000 daily meals.

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A picture from an advertisement illustrating the quality of the service offered

by Ligabue on Alitalia flights, 1980

vide the catering for Alitalia aircraft in transit at Milan Linate. A new 6,000 square metre centre was opened with around 150 employees providing 9,000 meals a day. Two years later, in September 1996, Ligabue announced that it had also won a catering contract for Malpensa airport. In the two Milanese airports, the Venetian company operated under its own name.

Air traffic was growing at an amazing rate and, in June 1996, Giancarlo Ligabue opened a new Sole catering centre at Venice airport: 10,000 square metres handling 5,000 meals a day with 130 employees, also able to pack meals for maritime services and canteens. There had only been one drawback: red tape. It took five years to go from the design to the official opening. The construction work was completed in only 12 months, which means that four years were spent on various permits and bureaucratic paperwork.

Some fascinating titbits were furnished during the official opening press conference, especially concerning chefs and personalised menus for private jets. For mere mortals, on the other hand, airlines started making savings that in later decades would lead to radical reductions in inflight meals. In early 1998, Ligabue acquired the catering firm at Rome’s Fiumicino airport with 420 employees.

Restaurants and sundry In the 1960s and ‘70s, Ligabue supplied fifty foreign embassies in Rome with food, drinks and tobacco, through its own agent in the city.

In 1988, it bought the historic Caffè Quadri, in Piazza San Marco, Venice, which was in real danger of becoming a fast food restaurant. “As a Venetian”, said Giancarlo Ligabue in an interview with Il Giornale, in August 1988, “I couldn’t allow a place so rich in history and tradition, a salon that had welcomed Byron, Liszt, Wagner and Dali, to shut down or lose its character. So, I decided to intervene.

Until the autumn the Quadri will continue only as a bar. Then it will be renovated and reopen as a restaurant in a few months’ time.” In fact, after having been closed for a lengthy time, the Ristorante Quadri, the only restaurant overlooking Piazza San Marco, was reopened and relaunched in April 1989. A few months later, in 1990, Ligabue also took over the management of a celebrated café in Udine, the Contarena.

The Venetian company not only ran prestigious, historic restaurants. The then numerous workers in the Murano glassworks also ate Ligabue style: a special kitchen centre prepared 800 meals a day for them.

This account of all the types of businesses pursued by the parent company and its

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subsidiaries in the various countries from 1960 to 2000, a period of great ferment and incredible technological developments, is inevitably summary and far from exhaustive. In those years, Ligabue extended its presence on the five continents, where the “brand” consolidated its reputation, still synonymous with reliability and flexibility.

After a period of inertia, the company has again achieved a sharp increase in sales volume, among other successes, as can be read in the following chapter, written

by Inti Ligabue, who has been leading this remarkable entrepreneurial adventure for several years now.

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Vehicles belonging to the Sole company, a Ligabue holding, supply a British Airways Concorde at Venice airport, 1986.

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Giancarlo Ligabue

An advertisement for the historic Café Ristorante Quadri on St Mark’s Square, acquired by Ligabue in 1988.

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Inti Ligabue

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Inti Ligabue, chairman of Ligabue SpA, speaking at a presentation of the top 500 companies in the Province of Venice.

La grande impresa

hen I started working in the company in 2005, I was fresh from university studies in economics. Then I would actually have preferred to pursue a master’s degree, or to gain experience abroad, like many of my fellow students and friends. But the times demanded I should do something different.

My father was keen to speed up the generational turnover in the company management and for me to train in the field. I only fully understood the real reasons for this afterwards: his advancing illness and the first signs of the company beginning to lose direction. Some of the sectors that we worked in would soon experience an epochal crisis: a revolution in life styles, everyday rhythms and technologies that the new millennium had ushered in and that we were struggling to cope with. I was still not aware of this crisis. The company that I had always seen as an invincible fortress was beginning to crumble.

At that time, basically only two divisions were driving Ligabue. Moreover, my father’s political commitments at the European Parliament from 1994 to 1999 had taken him away from the company, which was left in the hands of trusted managers, who had mainly leaned heavily on the Cruise Division, on one hand, and Airports and Air Catering, on the other. In recent years the latter division had been very successful for our company: from airport services (boutiques, bars, duty-free shops and restaurants) to inflight meals.

This market, however, required a very different organisation from what we had been used to and the choice made then was to invest heavily in facilities for mass-produced meals, resulting in a strain on the company’s balance sheet. The contracts with the air companies were binding and complex, while the number of users were spiralling, but the forward vision was probably not very clear. On the first day of the facility opened at Milan Malpensa airport in 1998, instead of the expected figure of 1,000 meals, 5,000 were served.

In those years the airport sector dominated. The company invested in Milan Linate, redeveloped the Venice airport facility managed by our subsidiary Sole, entered a partnership with the second largest air caterer worldwide, Gate Gourmet (a rib of Swiss Air), and took over catering at Rome Fiumicino airport (1998) with 420 employees. These did not turn out to be profitable investments. It was a time of tensions with the unions and economic difficulties: my father’s concerns at that time were well known. Later, Gate Gourmet patted us on the back and quit the partnership, leaving Ligabue with the burden of resolving pending issues.

Unfortunately, the market was also changing radically. To give a trivial but illuminating example: in the 1980s, expensive dishes, from fillet to lobster, were served on the business-class flights between Venice and Fiumicino, but ten years later this would be unthinkable. Today no meals are served on those flights.

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Profits on this market were falling and mass tourism was beginning to boom. The concept of air travel was evolving and the business model had changed drastically.

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A Ligabue warehouse at Marghera, Venice.

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Ligabue forklifts load food supplies in the port of Venice.

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The Ligabue headquarters in Marghera, Venice.

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A Ligabue chef with kitchen staff.

The unforgettable, dramatic events of 11 September 2001 altered our perception of everyday life and marked a real watershed between two eras. That year all the markets collapsed and the various air carriers were especially badly hit. Several of our customers went bust or slumped, companies such as Alpi Eagles, Swiss Air, Volare, Air Azzurra and Alitalia. But not only did the market shrink, our credits became de facto irrecuperable.

This saw the beginning of the agony of the revocatory actions imposed by liquidators to recover the assets of bankrupt companies and so protect creditors. We were also creditors, but whereas we had to pay for services received, we never recovered any of our amounts due.

The division was eventually wound up in 2006. I myself had to sell it, given there were no prospects of improvement.

Meanwhile, from the late 1990s to the early 2000s, the cruise sector, the other pillar of the company, had also been undergoing great changes. Our typical customers, small or medium-sized fleet owners with up to six or eight ships, were disappearing because they were being absorbed by the big American companies, as had happened in 1997 with Costa Crociere, which was followed by many others.

Ligabue had enjoyed close ties with the German shipowner Peter Deilmann, also from the human and personal point of view. But when he died, the company decided not to renew the contract with Ligabue (a few years later we even had to take our account books to court). Another major partnership also ran into trouble. We had been managing six ships for Festival Crociere, founded by George Poulides. It was a very important contract not only in economic and development terms but also for visibility. But the Italo-Greek company was declared bankrupt in 2004, and Ligabue lost several million euros.

This was the context when I effectively began my commitment to the family business. I wasn’t immediately aware of the full extent of the situation: I had always considered my father to be an intrepid admiral and Ligabue an unsinkable ship.

But then one special person, Vincenzo Onorato, a great entrepreneur and a family friend, had the courage to make me open my eyes and see the by then obvious dangers threatening the company. I’m deeply indebted to him for having had the merit and the strength to do so.

I will always remember the day when he summoned me to Valencia and, in an emo-

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Recovery The crucial years were from 2009 to 2012. They witnessed drastic decisions, but also key events that made it possible to save the company and return to the steady growth that continues today, when we are once more an international leader in our sector.

The inevitable decision in 2009 was to sell a minority stake in the company to an investment fund. This refinanced the company and gave us the chance to continue working and keep hope alive.

It was then that the Industrial Division, which had been neglected over the years,

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The Moby Aki Lines ferry, owned by Gruppo Onorato; the catering continues to be managed

by Ligabue.

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An Eni onshore oil prospecting rig.

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The Saipem staff canteen at Ben Aknoun, Algeria.

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Provisions in the kitchen of a river cruise vessel on the Danube.

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The Saipem 7000 (formerly Micoperi 7000) can mount some of the largest sea cranes in the world.

The new millennium

tively charged atmosphere affecting us both, discussed the difficult situation in the company and my father. He said: “If you go bankrupt now, nobody can blame you.

You were catapulted into this situation, but remember that you will always be a bankrupt.” He thus warned me of the moral risks of bankruptcy. I returned home convinced not to give up, but also shaken by the burden of responsibility.

I was acutely aware of the stagnant situation, the worn-out markets, and a management that had done its best, but was no longer in step with the times.

Moreover, there had been a fatal coincidence a few months earlier. Just at the most delicate moment for Ligabue, the long-standing managing director, the person chosen by my father to be a bridge between the two of us, left the company.

There ensued six years of losses that dragged us down into a total crisis of finances and assets. We had become the bottom of the class and I was inevitably cast as the bad guy and the cause of this failure – the person who had squandered the toil and sweat of so many others.

I remember it was a period of great anxiety. But I had the support of some close collaborators and I have never forgotten the encouragement and affection expressed in that “Valencian” conversation. The examples of my grandfather and my father did the rest. They inspired me never to abandon the values and the family style that they had handed down through the generations.

The early years were far from easy. At that time there was no real driving market, everything was going badly; the gauge on the finances indicator continued to fall, our debts soared and promises made to suppliers, banks and auditors were increasingly difficult to keep.

Ill-judged investments were also made, such as a warehouse in Genoa, a real cathedral in the desert. The idea had been to cut the costs of sales and our suppliers’ logistics with the aim of moving into the American cruise market, then beginning to take root on the Tyrrhenian coast. But this didn’t work out and the management costs became unsustainable.

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The Grimaldi Lines Cruise Roma is a ROPAX ferry that can carry up to 2,794 passengers.

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The Cielo d’Italia, a ship owned by the Gruppo d’Amico, which continues to use Ligabue catering.

began to bear fruit that provided indispensable results for the whole company.

The purchase in 2003 of a firm providing the catering for large construction sites in remote areas turned out to be a successful investment. The newly acquired subsidiary began to string together years of growth in double figures and significant profits, made with our support.

Then, in 2009, we won a crucial contract with Saipem and Eni: the management of food supplies to various barges (support vessels for building sites) involved in the construction of the gas pipeline in the Kashagan field in Kazakhstan.

The Industrial Division had finally given us the necessary breathing space. Now we needed to act to rebuild the long-standing maritime market as well.

Stripped of airport catering, sold off in 2006, and with the cruise market in crisis, we decided to embark on two major operations: the acquisition of Plantours & Partner, a German tour operator in the soft-adventure cruises sector (this was to turn out to be a strategically effective move, especially given current developments) and entry into the fast-developing ferry market, which gave the company extra financial oxygen in the summer months with its specific business model.

In 2010, the recovery was still weak and although I was not yet formally in charge of the company, I realised I had to make radical decisions first-hand.

They were tough times because we had to start the complete restructuring of the Ship Supply Division, with the closure of some historic warehouses, such as those in Livorno and Ravenna and the sale of the Genoa warehouse to a subsidiary of MSC (Italcatering).

These inevitable but humanly difficult operations reduced the workforce by around 100 people. The sales volume basically remained stable but the costs of management and debt maintenance (mainly due to the Genoa warehouse) were halved.

We not only needed to turn the company around, we also had to tackle a series of liabilities and legal cases that almost suffocated us for years. These very expensive, complicated legal burdens slowed the company down and clouded our thinking. But thanks to my friends and great professional experts in legal and economic matters, Roberto Nevoni and Renato Bogoni (who is now also on the board), we solved them one by one.

We then moved on to revising the organisation and taking action on processes, people and companies: we redesigned the business model; modified the approach to supply chain contracts in the Cargo Division (no longer fixed instalments but cost plus pricing with objectives); redefined relations with all customers; and invested in training and rejuvenating the management.

We cut down on the number of companies in order to eliminate or simplify the complexity and introduced more direct, transparent decision-making steps so that there were clear responsibilities and merits.

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The Hamburg cruise ship moored at a quay on the Thames in London.

The Hamburg, Ligabue staff at work in the dining room.

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The Hamburg, detail of the plating prepared by the Ligabue staff.

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The Hamburg, kitchen staff.

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Rendering of the Lady Diletta, the new ship owned by Ligabue.

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Inti Ligabue with the San Marco award for Venetian entrepreneurial excellence, 2019.

The new millennium

By 2012 we were finally on a constructive path of growth. The company started hiring again, and the sales volume has risen from the 200 million euros in 2012 to over 350 million this year. Our debt has been greatly reduced and, most importantly, we have won back the trust of operators who worked with the group in the past.

Since that crucial period the industrial market has grown by double figures and has become a pivotal segment in our organisation.

In the last five years, the Ferries Division has also grown considerably through our partners’ acquisitions of entire fleets and the entry of some of them into northern European seas.

The recent corporate acquisitions are paving the way to further positive developments: from being a prey, as we were in the early 2000s, we have become an aggregator. In 2018, two companies were purchased: the Admiral Marine Services in Abu Dhabi, to strengthen catering in the offshore sector in the Middle East, and the Dutch MAAS Shipstores in Rotterdam, for the Ship Supply Division. The latter acquisition consolidated Ligabue supplies in northern Europe and so guaranteed the jobs, otherwise at risk, of seventy people.

We have also repositioned the Cruise Division to be closer to the end customer, thanks to the role played by our tour operator, given that the leisure business is driven by the impact of passengers’ demands on the market. This change has led us to invest in the construction of a river cruise vessel, to be named after my daughter, Diletta.

My father died on 25 January 2015 and, despite the pain of that loss, I have the joy of knowing that I was able to reassure him that the company was safe.

Today the Ligabue Group has 7,700 employees of 40 different nationalities. They are the people who take the name of Ligabue out into the world. I am fully aware of this and feel a sense of pride and responsibility towards them.

Knowing and understanding the past and the present inevitably helps us interpret the future, but it is certainly far from easy. Doing business today is a truly complicated undertaking. It involves working in ultra-competitive contexts with hostile bureaucratic and fiscal structures and ever-changing macro-economic scenarios, often influenced by geopolitical issues.

The future response to these challenges will depend on the quality of human resources, their cohesion, shared objectives and everyone identifying with a system of common values. Lastly, it will require bold, well-pondered, effective decisions.

Speûde bradéōs!

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From the Study Centre to the Foundation Giancarlo Ligabue during an exploratory trip to Easter Island, 1992.

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The UNESCO Image et Science Award presented to Giancarlo Ligabue for popularising science, Paris, 2000.

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La grande impresa

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n his office desk are a varied array of objects: a chopper from Olduvai Gorge (the first tool used by humankind), a bifacial hand axe from the Sahara desert, a small stone sculpture of an Andean llama, a silver paperweight in the shape of an open sardine tin, a fossil skull of a sabre-toothed tiger, some gems from an eighteenth-century Murano glass necklace in a box of pressed paper, and a single disposable food pack for astronauts with the NASA emblem. Then there are also some folders with the name of an Asian country containing documents for a supply or a contract, a book on evolution and hominids, some pencils, and a magnifying glass.

On the wall, next to the door, some framed photos show him in the company of statesmen, and the King and Queen of Sweden, while there is also a diploma authorising him “to hunt dinosaurs”, a document assigning his name to an asteroid, and a letter from Wilbur E. Garrett. Giancarlo Ligabue often pointed to that framed letter and sometimes took it down from the wall so visitors could read it.

Garrett, the editor of National Geographic, was no pen-pusher. While working as a photographer, he had been kidnapped by guerrillas in Laos. In his letter, he complimented the “Ligabue Foundation” (sic) for its research work and how Ligabue Magazine was organised and progressing. He also thanked Giancarlo for the gift of a Valdivia-culture terracotta figurine and accepted, without being able to take it up immediately, an invitation to Venice. He, in turn, hoped that “Mr. Giancarlo Ligabue would drop into 20036 Washington D.C. in the near future”, that is to the headquarters of the most famous magazine in the world.

When National Geographic first came out in 1888, it was only a few pages, rather like the first slim issue of Ligabue Magazine. One day Garrett explained his philosophy to the Washington Post: “We go to places that deserve to be described. We have what the others miss”. He was sensitive to issues that went beyond the usual curiosity for the tides of the northern seas or the moons of Saturn. He tried to explain, for example, the effects of El Niño in Peru and the Andean farmers’ problems with coffee and coca. He was an innovator and adventurer, even when popularising. A bit like Giancarlo Ligabue, who was fond of saying: “Many people thought that there was nothing left to be discovered in the world. With our explorations we have demonstrated that this wasn’t true.”

We are sure that somewhere there must be a powerful wide-angle photo of the image I have just described of Ligabue’s Venice office full of signs and symbols, conveying powerful messages. This hypothetical picture would also be the clearest, most significant summary of the relationship he wove between business and culture. If there really is even only one snapshot of how of this Venetian full of humour and curiosity was always capable of writing the chapters of his story, it will

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surely eventually come to light. Meanwhile, we will tell the story of a man who chose to almost never work alone, since he liked to share the efforts and satisfactions in scientific research and entrepreneurial adventures. It’s now also the story of his son, Inti, who literally followed in his father’s footsteps: at the age of eight, he had already begun to walk alongside Giancarlo and some paleoanthropologists in Tanzania. He is now contributing another chapter – “his own” – in the adventure of knowledge and communication, through the activities of the Foundation that he created and dedicated to his father, who had left him a catering company with a global reach.

Giancarlo Ligabue was an entrepreneur who loved to navigate in a system that brought together corporate responsibility, scientific research and the dissemination of knowledge, at a time when this combination was almost unknown in Italy. To characterise this unusual mix of the adventurous aspect of expeditions and the explorations of a catering entrepreneur, who never “went on holiday because he always spent his free time amongst archaeologists and palaeontologists”, they hastily dubbed him “the Indiana Jones of the lagoon”, or “of the Grand Canal”. In the company office, however, nobody moved a facial muscle whenever that facile title cropped up and which the chairman was anything but fond of, although, he did actually quite like adventure films. This brings us to an extraordinary coincidence that almost nobody could have known about at the time: the idea of a character called Indiana Jones came to the American producer and director George Lucas in 1973, a date that – as we will see – was of crucial importance for Giancarlo Ligabue.

Moreover, in an interview, Lucas admitted that the inspiration for Indiana Jones was due to another adventurous Venetian explorer: Giovanni Battista Belzoni. This giant of a man (over two metres tall), full of courage and enthusiasm spent his life as an archaeologist in Egypt. He, too, was larger than life.

Giancarlo’s passion for archaeology was kindled when, as a teenager, he first held a flint arrowhead in his hand. A Treviso businessman, Augusto Krüll, had gifted him an arrowhead that he had found on the slopes of the Montello hills. This second son of Herman Krüll, a Prussian who had settled in Venice in 1850, explained the life and history of the men associated with the arrowhead in such a captivating way that Giancarlo Ligabue was hooked: “I could envisage everything that he so vividly described.”

Giancarlo was struck by a yearning for adventure, the kind of adventure he had long encountered in books, especially by Emilio Salgari: “I owe the Veronese writer” – Ligabue used to say – “much of my desire to explore the world”. After some initial exams in economics at Ca’ Foscari University, the young Ligabue began to travel around the world on ships as a “special envoy” for his father Anacleto: from Sumatra (“where I found out that cannibals still existed”) to Iran. This marked the beginning of his life as an entrepreneur who was also an explorer, collector and researcher.

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From the Study Centre to the Foundation

Giancarlo Ligabue with Papua New Guinea pygmies, who still make stone axes, 1985.

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Giancarlo Ligabue and Alberto Angela in Mongolia, 1991.

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Giancarlo Ligabue with a Papua New Guinea pygmy, 1985.

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A Papua Dani crossing a river on a felled tree trunk, Papua New Guinea, 1985.

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Giancarlo Ligabue and Donald Johanson examining a hominid skull in Tanzania, 1986.

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Then, one day in 1971 – after the death of his father Anacleto, Giancarlo had taken over running the company – while flying back from Paris, he chanced on a long interview in a French newspaper with a young palaeontologist called Philippe Taquet, just back from searching for dinosaurs in Niger. “He phoned me at the Natural History Museum in Paris,” the scientist recalled with bright, smiling eyes, “and suggested we meet in Venice. When I arrived at his house, he told me that he wanted to excavate a dinosaur with me.” From 1971 to 1973 they went on several expeditions to an area in the Ténéré Desert in Niger called Gadoufaoua, meaning “the place where camels fear to go” and where French geologists were prospecting ahead of mining activities. This was the seed of Giancarlo Ligabue’s great human and scientific adventure. From the beginning of his career, he was an entrepreneur-scientist who, when not sleeping in a tent in the desert, had to manage a company providing catering in the air and airport sector. The business expanded, especially after the international success as the first caterer supplying industrial companies involved in oil and gas drilling on offshore platforms throughout the world.

The arrival of a reptile weighing several hundred kilos in sealed boxes in Venice, on the other hand, marked the beginning of the epic story of what became the Ligabue Study and Research Centre (LSRC). It drew the attention not only of the whole city of Venice but also the international scientific community. The intact skeletons of an Ouranosaurus nigeriensis and a Sarcosuchus imperator (a huge extinct crocodile over eight meters long) were housed in the Museum of Natural History, soon making it a great attraction in Italy, a country where entire dinosaurs had never been seen before, but only casts or pieces of dinosaurs. Ligabue ended up in newspapers and magazines all over the world, and artists like Dino Battaglia, a great master of the comic strip in the second half of the twentieth century, were called on to illustrate the story of the discovery. A documentary film produced immediately after the first expedition captivated the audience of the Trento Film Festival. Interest was to grow even more twenty years later, when the film Jurassic Park appeared and the “real dinosaur” of Venice became a star, even though no one, or almost no one, knew that the greatest difficulty encountered in bringing the Ouranosaurus nigeriensis to Italy had been the customs office in the lagoon, whose inspectors were dismayed because no category contemplated “the import of fossil dinosaurs”.

Together with Philippe Taquet, Giancarlo Ligabue set off on new paths that led them to work with world-famous scientists on expeditions to Madagascar and Brazil (several times) in search of more dinosaurs to be compared with those of the Ténéré and to check the theory and history of the Gondwana supercontinent. Founded with the aim of collaborating with other research centres, institutions and universities, the LSRC was then involved in expeditions to Patagonia, Saudi Arabia and India.

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Meanwhile, Giancarlo Ligabue had been studying at the Sorbonne: his PhD on Leonardo and dinosaurs is well worth reading for his insights and modernity. He was later to become a corresponding member of the Natural History Museum in Paris.

After the pursuit of dinosaurs, the LSRC began to engage in ethnographic exploration campaigns documenting various peoples: the Yanomami of the Upper Orinoco, in Venezuela (1976), a people on the brink of extinction; and the tribes of the Jívaro and Waorani in Ecuador. This ethnographic interest culminated in the encounter on the Philippine island of Palawan with the Tau’t Bato cavemen, who had never had any previous contact with white men; the achievement had a worldwide echo.

It’s quite a daunting task to try and find a common thread linking all these activities on an imaginary chart, or rather identify the many threads making up that unprecedented and spectacularly modern map. It must be remembered that the catering business, driven by geological prospecting, had increasingly become a frontier activity. There was a need, therefore, to study frontiers, the edges where maps become approximate: those areas would provide new knowledge and inspiration for future scientific explorations and business activities.

There was more than a geographical frontier to be discovered or crossed. For Ligabue Catering and the LSRC there was also a cultural frontier to be pushed back.

Understanding how humanity once lived, what it was like in the past, means getting closer to how we are and, above all, how we will be and how we will change in the face of a constantly evolving environment. The ability to move along borders,

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Equipment cases used on Ligabue Study and Research Centre expeditions.

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A Tuareg observes a dinosaur spine in the Ténéré Desert, Niger, 1973.

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The skeleton of the Ouranosaurus nigeriensis excavated by a Ligabue expedition in 1973 and now on show in the Venice Museum of Natural History.

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The crates containing the skeleton of the Ouranosaurus nigeriensis arrive at the Venice Museum of Natural History.

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Giancarlo Ligabue and “his” dinosaur, installed in a dedicated room in the Venice Museum of Natural History.

entering and leaving new dimensions, required a combination of rare strengths and, for the purpose, over the decades, Ligabue built up a long series of contacts with research centres, institutes, universities and scientists.

By the turn of the 1980s and ‘90s, the compass of the Study and Research Centre increasingly pointed towards Latin America. This was the time of the explorations in the Upper Rio Marañón, archaeological and ethnological research in Bolivia, the discovery of the Chachapoyas’ mummies, again in Peru, the campaigns focused on Andean cultures before the Incas, the expeditions to make in-depth studies of the remains of a world inhabited by tribes in danger of extinction, and journeys following the traces of the last shamans. There were also explorations in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta (Colombia) and Argentinean Patagonia, while impressive archaeological searches led to the challenging excavations in Moche culture tombs in northern Peru and the royal mausoleum of Sipán. Some discoveries were made in the Mesoamerican world, especially concerning Mayan culture in the Colha area, in Belize, where LSRC scientists found traces of a chocolate beverage in some ceramics from the 4th century BC: the earliest detected to date (i.e. in the 1980s). All of this led to new interpretations based on the rediscovered role of the highland Mayas and the history of environmental collapses that went hand in hand with the end of a powerful culture.

The attraction for Latin America continued with Easter Island (Chile): three years of excavation campaigns with top Italian scientists working alongside Chilean archaeologists in a first-time collaboration that led to a major exhibition on the Pacific Ocean island in the Castello Sforzesco, Milan. Italy discovered many Latin American stories and cultures through Giancarlo Ligabue. In the 1980s, Venice had already hosted – once more thanks to the ideas of Giancarlo Ligabue – the exhibition Treasures of the Land of Atahualpa: Ecuador from Prehistory to the Inca, and almost twenty years later, again at the Palazzo Grassi, Venice, a highly original, large exhibition on Mayan culture.

The scientist and explorer-entrepreneur continued his activity in search of the ancient populations that had colonised the Pacific islands, Polynesia and New Guinea. From this region Ligabue brought back a gift for the Venice Museum of Natural History in the Fondaco dei Turchi: a canoe, bought for a few kilos of tobacco, sawn up to take it on the plane and reassembled in a boatyard in the lagoon. “An adventure? Not really”, smiled Ligabue, “there were more risks involved for the four Venetian oarsmen who rowed the pirogue – it was over a dozen metres long – from the boatyard in the lagoon up the Grand Canal to the Museum of Natural History. It was very narrow and difficult to steer. They risked capsizing at every paddle stroke because of the strong swell.” Venice has always been the centre, the soul and the heart of Giancarlo

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Cameraman Sergio Manzoni filming three Ilongot warriors in the Philippines, 1978.

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Some native Tau’t Bato men watch the arrival of an LSRC expedition on the Island of Palawan in the Philippines, 1978.

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Ligabue and his activities, both as a researcher and entrepreneur. The expeditions continued with trips to Irian Jaya, the Marquesas Islands, Indonesia and Australia, where he discovered cave paintings in Arnhem Land, almost 20,000 years old, and one particularly impressive scene depicting an ancestral birth.

In the same period, ethnology and anthropology were always primary interests in the passionate searches that Ligabue, and the scientists who followed him, undertook in various areas as they studied in the enormous spaces of Africa: from predynastic Egypt to the excavations in the Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, which brought to light the remains of Homo habilis from two million years ago; in Tanzania, the LSRC also studied the Hadza people. Paleoanthropological research in Africa was conducted in search of the Land of Punt in Sudan. In Southern Africa, paleoanthropological excavations were carried out in the plateau of the Kalahari Desert, and other explorations were also pursued in Botswana.

A great period of explorations and research was conducted in conjunction with Ligabue Catering’s business activities in the Asian steppe regions. From the intense campaigns of archaeological excavations in the Karakum Desert (ancient Margiana) in Turkmenistan to the area of the Berel glacier in the Altai Mountains in Kazakhstan, which brought to light a mausoleum with many perfectly intact grave goods belonging to a Scythian prince from the 4th century BC. This was a particularly complex operation because of the need to preserve the finds extracted from permafrost in cold storage and involved taking refrigerator trucks up to a Kazakh mountain plateau on the border with China.

Adding together all these explorations and studies plus the popularising activities described below is quite staggering. It came as no surprise, therefore, in 2000, in collaboration with the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, UNESCO in Paris awarded Giancarlo Ligabue, President of the Study and Research Centre, the Image et Science prize for “the exceptional contribution to cultural dissemination, audiovisual production, scientific publications and commitment to museum activities.” Ligabue was given Camera Awards for three of the four sections of the prize: for a foundation (the Study Centre), a magazine (Ligabue Magazine), and a museum (“for his efforts to revitalise the Venice Museum of Natural History”). One of the most prestigious international cultural organisations thus acknowledged the results of 130 expeditions on all continents and the dense network of relationships established with scientists worldwide. Three years later, in the thirtieth anniversary year of the foundation of the Ligabue Study and Research Centre, Giancarlo recalled how the idea for the centre came to a group of friends and scholars who shared his passion for archaeology and other subjects, not to mention travelling: “Our greatest source of pride are the expeditions made on five continents. We gave many young

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researchers of all nationalities the chance to gain experience in the field, always dedicated to furthering knowledge about humankind, our origins and habitats, fully respecting specific ethnic traditions.” The Study Centre’s huge steps forward for the future invite us to look at the initial stages of its development, when the synergies with the catering company were a decisive element for the funding and the international expansion of both organisations.

A number of scientific and moral guides have accompanied the Study Centre along the paths of the world, such as the renowned archaeologist Sabatino Moscati, who acknowledged Giancarlo Ligabue’s ideas leading to results like the studies on Bactria, an area bordering on Afghanistan: “they force us to rewrite a part of the history of that Asian region”. There were some great celebratory get-togethers between friends and scientists when, for example, Ligabue invited round to his house Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, an ethologist, and one of Konrad Lorenz’s most famous pupils, or the prominent geneticist, Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza. Those frequent meetings were exciting opportunities for discussing projects and exchanging ideas.

The truly great historic contacts include the Russian archaeologist of Pontic Greek origins, Viktor Sarianidi, a scholar who gave a huge impetus to the exploration of the ancient Oxus civilisation. Sarianidi helped recover 22,000 gold items, which he himself had discovered twenty-five years earlier, believed to have been dispersed (or even sold) in Kabul after the chaos of the war. There were also lengthy explorations of many Peruvian Amazonian and Andean areas with Federico Kauffmann Doig and the unforgettable discovery of a two-million-year-old hominid in Tanzania with the American palaeoanthropologist Donald Johanson.

Giancarlo Ligabue made a significant contribution to popularising science by writing, either alone or with other authors, dozens of scientific books, some the result of his own field researches. In his writing and publishing, he almost anticipated the motto of the Foundation named after him (“Know and make known”), created in 2016 by his son Inti. His most significant books include Il pane e la chiglia (Bread and Keels, 1985), Battriana (Bactria, 1988), Prima dell’Alfabeto (Before the Alphabet, 1989), Popoli in bilico (Peoples in Danger, 1990), Mongolia (1992), Ecce homo (1999) and I cavalieri delle steppe (Knights of the Steppes, 2000). The Study and Research Centre also produced over seventy documentaries, and many were shown on Quark, a RAI TV programme presented by Piero Angela, as well as on other Italian and foreign networks. Here, again, the list is too long to cite in its entirety. But mention must be made, for example, of the series Sulle orme dell’uomo (In the Footsteps of Mankind) shown by Swiss Italian television, the films in collaboration with RAI School and Education Department, the series Primissima by Giuseppe Sicari, Livingstone with Bruno Modugno, and collaborations with Italian newscasts and RAI special reports,

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A Mentawai man with his baby in the village of Siberut, Indonesia, 1986.

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Giancarlo Ligabue invites a Yanomami man to taste his dinner, Upper Orinoco, Venezuela.

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The Asmat canoe from Polynesia presented to the Venice Museum of Natural History

by Giancarlo Ligabue.

Below, the canoe arrives at the museum.

(Photo by A. Favaro)

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An elderly Dani with the body of an ancestor, Papua New Guinea, 1985.

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Donald Johanson and Alberto Angela at the Olduvai Gorge palaeontological site, Tanzania, 1986.

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The archaeologist Elena Barinova during the last excavation organised by the Ligabue Study and Research Centre, at Kaspan, Kazakhstan, 2014.

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Giancarlo Ligabue and Viviano Domenici in a Papua Dani village, Papua New Guinea, 1985.

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Newspaper cuttings on Ligabue Study and Research Centre expeditions.

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or the French network Le Cinq. There was one particularly memorable episode of the RAI’s Superquark with presenter Piero Angela and reporter Alberto Angela, who had been sent with a television crew to film and broadcast an event live from the Palazzo Erizzo in Venice: the opening, after forty centuries, of a rare Mesopotamian tablet packaged in a clay “envelope”. This breath-taking spectacle culminated in the tablet being interpreted by an expert Italian Assyriologist.

Pursuing business and culture in parallel also entailed ethical commitments: “You can’t be a good entrepreneur”, Ligabue used to say, “if you don’t know the current issues in the world”. His passionate interest in science – he was a man whose infectious enthusiasm inspired everyone in the company, the LSRC and on international expeditions – led him to work intensively on the dissemination of knowledge, primarily through the six-monthly bilingual Ligabue Magazine (now almost into its fortieth year). In addition to publishing his own magazine, he wrote dozens and dozens of articles for newspapers and journals worldwide. It made no difference if the article was for Il Gazzettino, the local Venetian newspaper, or the Corriere della Sera, the top-selling Italian national newspaper, or took the form of an interview with El Comercio in Lima.

The echo of his research activities once reached John Desmond Clark, a well-known British anthropologist and professor at the University of Berkeley, who was the first to link up palaeobotany, animal life and the socio-economic structures of prehistoric men: “Could I come with you to Irian Jaya?”, Clark asked, “I’d really like to see those men you discovered making stone axes as they used to do 10,000 years ago.” There is a photo that shows them calmly sitting next to a Papuan pygmy, one of the stoneaxe makers belonging to a tribe encountered after years of investigation. “Every time those quiet, half-naked small men looked at me,” Giancarlo Ligabue smiled, “I was aware of the fact that they were self-avowed cannibals. They were friendly, but I felt a slight shiver down my spine. You never know.”

Piero Angela, the well-known RAI broadcaster and the first journalist to bring science to television in Italy travelled and collaborated with the LSRC: “What was significant about the Study Centre explorations was also their discretion exercised in meetings with peoples living in isolation in large forests, or who were on the verge of extinction. The contacts were unobtrusive, and there was never any desire to change their lifestyle, just a few gifts, a ritual gesture in the encounter between strangers.

He totally respected others, always.”

Several discoveries bear the name of the founder of the Study and Research Centre, such as the fossil remains of dinosaurs or insects: Masrasector ligabuei, Augustiania ligabuei and Ligabueino andesi (a dinosaur the size of a chicken), an Oligocene creodont, and Araripescorpius ligabuei, a Cretaceous scorpion; the Ligabue saurus

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leanzai, on the other hand, a titanosaur from the Lower Cretaceous (110 million years ago) was found in Argentina.

For his studies, writings and archaeological discoveries (including five deposits of hominid fossils), Giancarlo Ligabue received five honorary degrees from the universities of Bologna, Venice, Modena, Lima (Peru) and Ashgabat (Turkmenistan), respectively. “Now I could also teach archaeology in a university on the Asian steppes,” he joked immediately after being handed the degree scroll together with a rug and a wool band from the rector of the university on the Silk Road, “but I’ve checked my diary, and I’m afraid I can’t make it on Friday morning.”

Driven by his insatiable curiosity, he took the Study Centre and the company way off the beaten track, almost always pioneering in areas that were the testing grounds for many actions, such as the nutritional research project in 1980 with an Italian expedition that attempted to scale Everest (8,884 metres, the highest peak in the world), or financing an individual survival test on Robinson Crusoe’s island (Más a Tierra), 200 kilometres off the west coast of Chile; and collaboration with the Italian CNR (National Research Council) on the first official scientific expedition to the South Pole, with the Ligabue company providing the catering.

From catering for tourists on the decks of a cruise ship to the extreme conditions of the petroleros in the Amazon or technicians on North Sea oil platforms, Ligabue experts had long been crossing over theoretical knowledge and practical experience in their work: from that “eating also with the eyes”, which Giancarlo had always emphasised, to the search for innovations based on traditions, cultures and taste.

Travels, scientific explorations and expeditions were an opportunity to experiment with any kind of local food, or to study the anthropological texts of Marvin Harris along with the travelogues of great explorers.

How can we learn more than what comes from direct experience? By studying all types of nutrition from the food of primitive men up to that of astronauts. It was not only a matter of fundamental professional knowledge for an entrepreneur who had made the distribution of food in remote parts of the globe his job: Giancarlo Ligabue was totally convinced that research, including research into food, was the way to innovation. That’s why he contacted anyone who could suggest new ideas or propose experiments even in extreme conditions: he cultivated this art of encounters with an almost religious passion.

Once, for example, he invited me out to lunch and on the other side of the restaurant table, we found Russian cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev and his girlfriend. Krikalev, 35, had returned from space a few months earlier. In May 1991, he had taken off on Soyuz TM-12 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome to reach the Soviet space station Mir, along with his Russian colleague Anatoly Artsebarsky and the British scientist

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Helen Sharman, for a six-month mission. No one could have foreseen the August coup in the Soviet Union, the arrest of President Mikhail Gorbachev, the subsequent failure of the coup, and the dissolution of the Soviet Communist Party in August. Ten former Soviet republics then proceeded to form the Commonwealth of Independent States (later to become the Russian Federation). Mikhail Gorbachev resigned and Boris Yeltsin became Russian president while the Soviet Union disappeared. Even the name of the city where Krikalev had been born was changed from Leningrad back to St Petersburg. While he was orbiting the earth, the Baikonur Cosmodrome has become Kazakh, and the newly independent state was asking large sums for the use of the spaceport.

The Russian Federation, short of funds, left Krikalev in orbit, but received millions of dollars to take another two cosmonauts into space, an Austrian and a Kazakh.

Meantime, the engineer who should have replaced Krikalev was left grounded.

Only on 19 March 1992, when Aleksandr Kaleri reached Mir on Soyuz TM-14, Sergei Krikalev finally returned to earth, and became a celebrity in great demand worldwide.

Giancarlo Ligabue was among the first to invite him to Italy, and he asked the cosmonaut to tell his story. Ligabue wanted to know what it was like to eat the same things for a year while living in solitude, and he investigated the sense of abandonment and fears. Krikalev’s story sometimes actually didn’t seem to be a twentieth-century affair, more the adventure of a nineteenth-century shipwreck survivor in the South Seas. If Ligabue’s beloved Emilio Salgari had still been around, he could have told the tale. For Ligabue, this was another experience to be transferred to his work and future research. Krikalev returned into space with the American Shuttle in 1994, the first Russian on a NASA spacecraft. Four years later, he was the first Russian to enter the International Space Station. He continued to journey into space until 2005.

That same year Giancarlo Ligabue, who had been elected Venetian of the Year in 1985, received the keys of the city from Mayor Massimo Cacciari. On that occasion, too, he demonstrated his talent as a raconteur, by recalling a conversation with his porters on an expedition in Peru: “On a mountain path the men suddenly stopped. I asked why.

They replied: ‘we’re going too fast. We must wait for our souls to catch up.’”

Powerful, sensitive and lyrical, this man who had never forgotten his first experience in Sumatra where his father Anacleto had sent him to manage the supplies on an oil field and discovered there were still some so-called “head-hunters” around. He was thunderstruck on experiencing first-hand what he had read in a line of verse by the Persian poet Omar Khayyam: “those who travel live twice”. For Giancarlo this meant he could have a twofold life: one as an entrepreneur and the other as an explorer. His life over time would become a metaphor for discovery, an icon of adventure, a symbol of study and research. Never business without culture. Even when you take risks. As in

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Donald Johanson announces the creation of the Giancarlo Ligabue Foundation in Venice, 2016.

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Inti Ligabue during one of the Ligabue Foundation Dialogues, 2016.

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Inti Ligabue, Alberto Angela and Adriano Favaro during a Ligabue Foundation Dialogue at the Teatro Goldoni in Venice, 2018.

The Bactrian bronze seal, formerly the symbol of the Study and Research Centre and now of the Ligabue Foundation, 2016.

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1987, when one of his adventures ended up on the front pages of all the newspapers.

“We were in Colombia searching for an isolated tribe that had been reported to us, the Chocó. From our helicopter we saw a series of pile huts.We landed and were met by armed soldiers. As a way of making contact, I asked: ‘Are there guerrillas here?’ ‘Senor, nosotros somos guerrileros (We are the guerrillas).’” Ligabue had to reply: “I’m a guerrilla too. I am at war with my wife every day.”The guerrillas’ laughter had an unsettling ring.

The visitors spent half a day almost without moving.They spoke a few words, and made some attempts to help some children and women who needed medicines. But the situation always remained very tense.Then Giancarlo Ligabue suddenly stood up as if he were late for an appointment: “Sorry, but I think it’s time to go.”The FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) guerrillas acquiesced: Ligabue, two journalists and the helicopter pilot, who was the owner of the lands where they had set down, now occupied by the guerrillas, were allowed to go. “We thought the helicopter was going to explode in flight or that they would have shot at us after take-off, but we lived to tell the tale.” Just before he died on 25 January 2015, Giancarlo admitted to his friends: “ I am amazed when I contemplate what we have achieved”.

Inti Ligabue has never moved one particular photo of his father from his desk: it shows him in the sun, his eyes trained on ongoing excavation work in the ground below. Inti has also left on view a photo of himself at the age of eight wandering around the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, looking for fossils, not far from his father and Donald Johanson. Reliving those moments, along with the many other explorations, is wonderful even though sometimes also sad.

Nowadays, returning to the tracks taken by expeditions, or paths in deserts or forests, is almost no longer possible in a changed world. Many, too many of the regions once reached by camel caravans, clapped-out jeeps, or after journeys on difficult mountain trails have been transformed by social tensions, permanent conflicts and war. For the time being and who knows for how long to come, the spaces available for science and research in a strife-torn world are being reducing, though without being completely eliminated. This doesn’t mean giving up, however.

If times, places and security have changed, the spirit that brought the Study Centre’s successes and discoveries has not. That spirit is still strong, although there has been a change of name and a reorganisation to respond to new needs and offer different opportunities. In fact, in January 2016, a year after his father’s death, Inti announced the creation of the Giancarlo Ligabue Foundation, as inadvertently “prophesied” by

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Wilbur Garret in his letter on National Geographic headed paper from Washington.

The Foundation has the role, as established by its statute, of promoting “culture and research, with a particular focus on the sectors of archaeology, anthropology, palaeontology, natural sciences and the figurative arts, also through events open to the public, themed exhibitions, conferences, publications and publishing activities, scientific consultancy, restorations and philanthropy, in Italy and abroad.”

Seventy percent of the sales volume of the historic catering company now comes from foreign operations. The international challenges are increasingly complex and the experiences of thousands of operators have been combined with entrepreneurial expertise to provide the best responses on the continents beyond Europe where Ligabue operates: from South America to Africa and Asia.

The world changes, markets change, but the urge to know remains the same and even grows. While Giancarlo used to say that “the knowledge and rediscovery of ancient civilisations is an essential prerequisite for understanding our common humanity”, Inti insists by explaining that studying the traces that humanity has left, in all its dimensions, has meant giving voice to cultures that have often left their legacy in only a few documents. “For the Giancarlo Ligabue Foundation to intercept those signals from the past it is essential to reconstruct the maps of our presence on this earth while looking at a future, a future that speaks all the languages of humanity. We live in an age when each of us must take on the responsibility of preserving objects and documents from other cultures and distant times.” Inti, who has already planned events and activities for the next ten years, suggests we “must also become poets narrating those cultures, preserving their history and nurturing their fascination for posterity”.

In fact, many discoveries made in the forty years of LSRC explorations and research have now become part of the history of palaeontology, archaeology and ethnology.

Accordingly, the Foundation immediately committed itself to the exhibition The World That Wasn’t There. From September 2015 to 6 March 2016, the National Archaeological Museum of Florence hosted pre-Columbian works of art from the Ligabue Collection and important pieces from other international collections and Florentine museums: 5,000 years of the art history of the ancient Americas, narrated and illustrated in an exciting show curated by Jacques Blazy and André Delpuech.

Many Italians thus rediscovered South American cultures and the art of almost forgotten peoples. After Florence, the same exhibition was equally successfully staged among the eighteenth-century stuccos and frescoes of the Palazzo Alberti Poja in Rovereto, a stone’s throw from the MART (Contemporary and Modern Art Museum of Trento and Rovereto), and then at the MANN (Naples National Archaeological Museum).

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Posters for the three major exhibitions recently organised by the Ligabue Foundation.

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The exhibition Idols.

The Power of Images was held at the Palazzo Loredan, Venice, in 2018.

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Giancarlo Ligabue with his son Inti in the Sahara Desert, 1988.

The same fascinating itinerary was the basis for the exhibition that opened at the Palazzo Loredan, home of the Veneto Institute of Science, Letters and Arts in Venice in the first half of 2017. Thirty-five years earlier, Giancarlo Ligabue had inspired an exhibition on the treasures of Atahualpa, the first great encounter with ancient South American art in Venice. The two events were explicitly linked cultural landmarks.

After the treasures of Central and South America, the next Ligabue Foundation exhibition in the Palazzo Loredan, in the first half of 2018, explored a splendid Mesopotamian filigree: Before the Alphabet. Journey to Mesopotamia at the Origins of Writing. Curated by Frederick Mario Fales, it was the culmination of studies on the Mesopotamian world and communication signs in that area, started by Giancarlo Ligabue in the mid-1980s.

The studies had previously led to the publication of a book (1989), again with Frederick Mario Fales, in which all the tablets with the first traces of writing in the Ligabue Collection were described. The 1989 research was incomplete, however. The other part of that world was missing: seals carved on hard and semiprecious stones. The exhibition thus showed objects that describe the evolution of writing in Mesopotamia six thousand years ago. The fascinating journey, enhanced with loans from museums in Turin and Venice, enthralled many thousands of visitors.

Three years have passed since the creation of the Foundation and the range of events continues to grow, thanks also to the “Foundation Dialogues”, well-attended public meetings with international guests on the themes of philosophy, anthropology, theology, art and sciences. For the “Dialogues”, the Teatro Goldoni in Venice regularly has a full house, and especially when Alberto Angela, editor of Ligabue Magazine comes to sign his latest book for his fans. In December 2018, after two hours of conversation on Cleopatra, he almost spent more time on signing autographs. He made sure not to miss, however, the exhibition curated by Annie Caubet: Idols. The Power of Images, on show from September 2017 to January 2018. The one hundred exhibits at Palazzo Loredan tell of a period of great transition in an area that goes from the borders of the Iberian Peninsula to the Oxus Valley and the Upper Nile in Egypt. Some of the hundred objects came from the Ligabue Collection, while others were loans from international private collections and major European museums.

The exhibits illustrated the period in which the so-called “Neolithic revolution” took place, that is when there was a shift from settlements of clans and tribes to more complex societies. The star of the show was undoubtedly the “Ligabue Venus”: a rare statuette of a lady from the Oxus civilisation, which developed along the valley of the Upper Amu Darya in the 3rd millennium BC. The Foundation’s future is increasingly closely bound to the Museum of Natural History. Venice City Council and mayor Luigi Brugnaro have named the museum after Giancarlo Ligabue, who was its president for many years. This decision has

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Old film cameras used during the early expeditions of the Ligabue Study and Research Centre.

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Giancarlo Ligabue in the Sahara Desert, 1988.

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publicly highlighted the significance of the long cooperation and the many initiatives with the city that first the LSRC and then the Foundation have pursued. A classic example is the much-acclaimed exhibition on the Gobi Desert dinosaurs, organised

by Giancarlo Ligabue, which went on to Paris.

Having become the Fondaco dei Turchi in 1621, the thirteenth-century building passed from hand to hand until taken over by City of Venice in the mid-nineteenth century.

There is a popular story about Saddo Drisdi, the last Turk in Venice, who reluctantly left the building in 1838. After being renovated, the Fondaco was used to house the Correr Museum (now in St Mark’s Square) and, since 1923, the Civic Museum of Natural History.

The refurbished museum’s main attraction is the room with the huge Ouranosaurus nigeriensis, one of the few intact dinosaur skeletons in Italy, brought back from Niger

by Giancarlo Ligabue’s first scientific expedition in 1973. This donation was followed by hundreds of others, mostly fossil items (including a remarkable stone with “fossil rain”) that thrill tens of thousands of visitors. There is also a room dedicated to the Venetian explorer Giovanni Miani, the “White Lion”, who donated many of his African finds to the City of Venice, before he died on his last journey in search of the sources of the Nile (1872). Next door is the room dedicated to Giancarlo Ligabue’s scientific activities and explorations containing important ethnological and archaeological items found during his expeditions with the Study Centre.

Alberto Angela, editor of Ligabue Magazine, neatly summed up the results of the work of the Ligabue Foundation: “An ark of knowledge, capable of captivating and surprising anyone with a thirst for learning”. The journey enabling us to live twice continues.

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Venezia Calcio wins promotion to Serie A with Anacleto Ligabue as vice-chairman, 1961.

La grande impresa

By the 1950s, Venezia was generally considered to be a team with a great past, almost an aristocrat fallen on hard times, and for several years just managed to stay afloat with no particular ambitions in Serie B. But in the 1960-1961 season, Anacleto Ligabue was appointed as a commissioner (external administrator) of the club. This marked a turning point for the future of the Blacks and Greens, especially after Ligabue recalled Carlo Alberto Quario as manager, a far-sighted choice, given that Venezia held out against rivals Mantua and Palermo to win the Serie B title. This memorable team included some outstanding players, such as the young Venetian Gianni Rossi and many new arrivals, Virginio De Paoli, Sergio Frascoli, Gianni Grossi and,

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n the 1960s and ‘70s, two generations of the Ligabue family left an indelible mark on Venetian sport. Thanks to their passion and rare spirit of service to the city, the entrepreneurs Anacleto and Giancarlo Ligabue wrote important chapters in the history of the major Venetian sports clubs, thus giving prestige to the name of Venice also in the field of sport.

The various kinds of Venetian sports – from the most popular professional sports (soccer and basketball) to amateur lagoon and seafaring activities (Venetian-style rowing, rowing, sailing and powerboating) – have seen and continue to see brief golden periods and long spells of oblivion. This situation is due to various factors, including, on one hand, the Venetian municipal authorities’ chronic lack of interest in developing competitive sport and renovating sports facilities and, on the other, the ruling class’s often indifferent attitude to the sporting fortunes of local teams.

Venice thus lagged behind the growth of professional sport in other cities, and the political-economic situation was the main reason why some presidents and executives generously took the helm of sports clubs, only to hand over to others once all hope had been lost of achieving plans to keep the lagoon teams permanently in the top flight. In this context, thanks to the energy and resources invested in sport, Anacleto and Giancarlo Ligabue rightfully take their place among the twentieth-century Venetians who have contributed most to the success of Venetian teams.

For several years in the early 1960s, Anacleto Ligabue played a leading role in Calcio Venezia football club. Only twenty years earlier, the glorious historic club, whose colours are black and green, had been led by an extraordinary couple of inside forwards – Ezio Loik from Fiume (Rijeka) and Valentino Mazzola from Milan – to win the Coppa Italia (Italian Cup) and clinch third place in Serie A. Indeed, the scudetto (title) only slipped away from them in the last few games, and the press unanimously agreed they had deserved to win it. The legendary couple Loik and Mazzola then tragically died in the Superga plane crash on 4 May 1949 that wiped out the whole of the great Torino team, in which they had gone to play after their Venetian exploits.

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especially striker Gino Raffin, who scored 17 goals. The Serie B title was celebrated in a traditional water parade from the Pier Luigi Penzo Stadium on Sant’Elena to Piazza San Marco with the jubilant fans in small boats accompanying the Bissona (“large snake” – a kind of giant gondola) carrying the players. When this team took Venezia back up into the Serie A, the city still had a lively social and economic fabric, and a population of 150,000. The nascent tourist industry, driven by the golden years of the Venice Film Festival, was still counterbalanced by the presence of various flourishing industries: shipyards, glassworks and also manufacturing companies, some located on the Giudecca, which was a kind of lagoon industrial district. In a climate of sporting enthusiasm based on a healthy socio-economic fabric, the typically Venetian-style entrepreneur Anacleto Ligabue was appointed vice-chairman along with Enrico Linetti on the board of Venezia Calcio, headed by the newly appointed chairman, Count Giovanni Volpi di Misurata.

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Anacleto Ligabue as vice-chairman of Reyer, the Venetian basketball team, 1960.

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Anacleto Ligabue being appointed chairman of the Bucintoro rowing club, Venice, 1962.

Historical studies of this period highlight how Volpi was a kind of emblematic presence for Venezia but, in fact, the count turned out to be much more interested in his racing car stable than in soccer and during his chairmanship, the running of the team remained firmly in Ligabue’s hands. This was confirmed only twelve months later, when Volpi resigned, despite a good season. With top player Juan Santisteban from Madrid in their ranks, Venezia avoided relegation and even drew level on points with Juventus, after beating them 3-0 at the Penzo stadium on the last day of the championship. During that incredible season one particular story symbolizes just how passionately Anacleto Ligabue followed the fortunes of Venezia. On the Sunday when the Blacks and Greens played Padova at the Appiani Stadium in search of the points that would guarantee them arithmetical safety, Anacleto Ligabue was forced to leave the stand in the second half, when he suddenly felt unwell due to the terrible tension. “But my team has avoided the drop and I feel great!”, Ligabue shouted at the end of the match to the Gazzettino reporter. Nonetheless, the episode prompted his doctor to advise him not to go to the next match, the following Sunday.

At the end of that exciting year, the future of Venezia depended on the decision concerning the building of a new stadium. Since 1939 (the year the stands still in use today were constructed), the glorious Pier Luigi Penzo stadium had incomprehensibly never been renovated to make it more spacious and modern. At the same time, the idea of a new stadium, to be constructed either in the Santa Marta area or on a site between San Giuliano and Marghera, just after the Ponte della Libertà on the mainland, was continually being discussed without any real progress being made. Period newspaper articles on the stadium issue include one in which the municipal admin-

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istration, led by the mayor Giovanni Favaretto Fisca, promised that the new stadium would be ready in 1965. The uncertainties due to the lack of any real action either on the project for the new stadium or the Penzo renovation was the main reason why Volpi resigned, and he was closely followed by Anacleto Ligabue who, although no longer vice-chairman, remained on the board a couple of years longer for the sake of his adoptive city. He didn’t want to withdraw his support for the club, which just survived in a precarious state with a temporary management run by commissioners, first Lorenzo Bettini and then Mario Gatto. When Ligabue did eventually also resign from the board, the situation precipitated with two straight relegations in 1967 and 1968 that plunged Venezia down from Serie A to the inferno of Serie C. Anacleto Ligabue always took a great interest in sports associations that bore the name of Venice, including one of the oldest sports clubs in the lagoon, the Reale Società Canottieri Bucintoro, a rowing club founded in 1882. Ligabue was appointed chairman of the club simply known as the Bucintoro in late 1962, and remained at its head for a long time to come. That year, the Bucintoro was preparing to celebrate its eightieth anniversary in grand style, and this presented the opportunity for the club to appoint a board capable of relaunching its image and making it more competitive. In late 1962, at a public meeting in its headquarters, then in the Palazzo Musatti, Anacleto Ligabue was elected chairman by acclamation, and flanked by vice-chairmen Sergio Barbasetti di Prun and Antonio Casellati, a future mayor of Venice. The new board made up of these important Venetian personages immediately proposed to revive the historic Bucintoro and restore it to the glories of the past, when the rowers with gold-and-garnet jerseys won national competitions and even some Olympic medals. In addition to organising the lavish celebrations for the club’s eightieth anniversary, Ligabue took a keen interest in rowing and saw to it that the Bucintoro soon managed to put together a crew of eight for a racing shell that came close to qualifying for the Tokyo Olympics. A Gazzettino article in Spring 1964 described the feat:

“This ‘boat’, however, was passionately promoted by Commendatore Anacleto Ligabue, Bucintoro chairman and a great supporter of the club’s rowing fortunes. Encouraged by the board, Ligabue said: let’s give it a go, we went to Helsinki, why can’t we go to Tokyo with a Venetian crew?”

Ligabue’s chairmanship is still remembered as one of the Bucintoro club’s legendary periods with many victories in regional and national competitions attracting great public participation. In another case, Anacleto handed over the sports patronage of the Ligabue family to his son Giancarlo for a club whose history

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was ultimately to be the most closely linked to the name of the Venetian entrepreneurs: the Reyer sports club. In the 1960s, the Costantino Reyer sports club comprised various disciplines: wrestling, boxing, gymnastics and basketball (both men and women). Founded in 1872, the club was celebrated thanks to victories in the top flight of the Italian men’s basketball championship in the years 1941-42 and 1942-43 (for the record: Reyer also won the following championship which, however, because of the war, was not ratified) and the women’s championship in 1945-46. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the club ran into difficulties and its future seemed uncertain but fortunately it survived thanks to administration by an external commissioner and the constant contribution of Anacleto Ligabue, as vice-chairman. The positive turning point for Reyer’s future coincided with the celebrations for its ninetieth anniversary, when an important group of Venetian businessmen rallied round the club, and, in late 1962, Giancarlo Ligabue was elected chairman. A Gazzettino article of 29 December 1962 reported on the appointment:

This article sums up how Giancarlo Ligabue’s chairmanship marked the start of a new era in the management and corporate organisation of Reyer but also a considerable sporting and social generational shift. At that time, unlike soccer, basketball was basically an amateur sport, even at the highest levels, with the exception of a few clubs, such as Milan, Varese and Bologna, which could afford to hire top foreign players. But in the Italy of the economic boom, basketball was also rapidly changing with the advent of professionalism and sponsors. This development was started in Venice by Giancarlo Ligabue’s modern vision, as he reorganised the club to keep Reyer permanently in Serie A. One of the great Reyer stalwarts at that time was Ezio Lessana, who played his

Patrons of Venetian sport

“Giancarlo Ligabue is the new chairman of Reyer. Already a member of the board, he takes over from Commendatore Giuseppe Bonfanti...The board has been expanded and strengthened compared to the previous one... the new board, through the appointment as chairman of the young Ligabue, a keen sports enthusiast, has in a way already announced its commitment to greatly strengthen the organisational and competitive programmes aimed at taking Reyer Venezia back to the top flight in Italy, also in those disciplines in which for various reasons it had been forced to stand still...

Giancarlo Ligabue has already had the opportunity to illustrate his plans to his colleagues, which involve not only building up the youth sector and bringing in the best athletes, but also reorganising the social structures and the safeguarding of the prerogatives of a club to which Venice owes its greatest sporting achievements.”

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whole career, from fourteen to thirty years old, in a garnet jersey, with the exception of a year in the ranks of Onestà, when he was doing military service in Milan.

He very fondly recalls the bond between the Ligabue family and Reyer.

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Giancarlo Ligabue became chairman of the Reyer basketball team in 1962.

The photo captures the moment the team won promotion to Serie A at the end of the 1963-64 season.

“Giancarlo Ligabue’s chairmanship gave new life to the club. I clearly remember the difficult moments of the previous years. At a certain point, to protest against the city’s indifference towards a historic club that had made Venice basketball champions of Italy, we even displayed all the cups on the Fondamenta della Misericordia with the aim of shocking the city administrators, fans and potential directors. In those difficult days, when the commissioner Bonfanti was trying to keep the club on its feet, he could always rely on Anacleto Ligabue, who in times of need never failed to support him.

In 1960-61, we hit rock bottom in sporting terms, when we were in Serie C, but that’s where the recovery started from.With a team of only young players – I was the oldest at twenty – we climbed through the categories to win Serie B in 1963-64 and promotion into Serie A.This revival was made possible by the new managerial vision introduced by Giancarlo Ligabue, who had realised how the world of basketball was changing.The first sponsor in the history of the garnet jerseys arrived, kitchen furniture manufacturers Noalex, and with the very talented Yugoslavian player, Nemanja Đurić and the Italian international Antonio Calebotta we came fourth in the top flight. Reyer was no longer a purely amateur club but could pay victory bonuses and signing fees.Then with the return of the great champion Nane Vianello to the club, we gradually moved towards full professionalism. I have unforgettable memories of those years for the great results, the wonderful managerial environment, and the relationships with the Ligabue family. I have had the good fortune to have known them for three generations.While Anacleto was the expression of an age when you worked fourteen hours a day and there wasn’t much free time, Giancarlo embodied an Italy that was changing. He already had so many passions, from archaeology to powerboating, and then we found a way of firing his enthusiasm for basketball.Today I am very impressed with the energetic way Inti Ligabue has taken over the family business. I feel close to the company, because when I was a twenty, I worked for them as an inspector in the foreign sales office for a couple of years.”

Giancarlo Ligabue was chairman of Reyer in the decade from 1962-63 to 1972-73 and then returned for the 1975-76 and 1978-79 seasons. Under his chairmanship, a great chapter was written in the glorious history of Reyer. He was a guide who gave stability to the club and returned it to the levels of its celebrated past with

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“The Reyer of the Ligabue years really was the ideal team to play for.

It was a special, very united environment, also because the players were Venetian workers or students, who trained in the evening.Wearing that jersey was an honour, just as it was an honour to be on the board. Although we were never relegated, we experienced some tough times at a competitive level. But the chairman and directors never failed to support us. I don’t remember any arguments or particular outbursts and no coach was ever sacked. If there were differences of opinion, everyone would go to dinner at the Bonvecchiati restaurant and all the differences would be smoothed out at the dinner table.The directors were all very friendly.They were like one big family. Just look at the pictures from that time.They also met a lot outside the office, and were often round at Ligabue’s house. For us players, Giancarlo Ligabue was a special person, besides being our chairman and a great entrepreneur, he was a renowned anthropologist. I must admit that when he invited us to his house, we were a bit overawed going around those ancient archaeological finds. I remember that when I asked him for explanations about some of the extraordinary objects I saw at his home, he responded with fascinating details, revealing his enormous passion for anthropology. It was an honour to have him as chairman.”

Among the difficulties that Ligabue had to tackle was the chronic problem of a

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A newspaper spread on the successes of the Reyer basketball team, then sponsored

by Canon thanks to the efforts of Giancarlo Ligabue, 1975.

Patrons of Venetian sport

The many positives of Giancarlo Ligabue’s long involvement with Reyer includes having successfully continued the family tradition of patronage in sport and having created a calm, united atmosphere around the team, as described by Manolo Guadagnino, who played seven seasons in a garnet jersey:

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excellent performances. In Serie B, having narrowly lost the playoff for promotion to Serie A against Goriziana in the 1962-1963 season, Reyer won the title in 196364. The team then played continuously in Serie A from 1964-65 until 1978-79, apart from one year in Serie A2 (1975-76). One of the most unforgettable seasons with Ligabue as chairman was the 1966-67 championship, when they team played at home among the frescoes of the Scuola Grande della Misericordia, which that year had been renovated and proudly renamed the Palasport della Misericordia.

Wearing the Noalex branded jersey, Reyer came fourth in the league and the CONI (Italian National Olympic Committee) awarded the club chaired by Giancarlo Ligabue the coveted “Golden Star for Sporting Merit”. The successes continued in the following seasons with Reyer solidly in fourth or fifth place behind Milan, Varese and Cantù, that is, the elite of Italian basketball.

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building for the arena. The most beautiful gym in the world, the Misericordia, was not suitable for hosting top-flight games and the league authorities wouldn’t allow Reyer to play at home. So while the Venetian city administration belatedly implemented the project for the Arsenale stadium, Ligabue had to play home games in Vicenza for two seasons. Reyer only finally returned to Venice on 23 October 1977, when the indoor Arsenale arena was officially opened. At the end of the 1978-79 championship, when Ligabue handed over to Roberto Carrain as Reyer chairman, the club had completely closed the gap with its Italian rivals.

The economically sound, well organised club now had a fine arena in the heart of Venice and was coached by Tonino Zorzi, who would also become a legend in Venetian basketball history.

When Giancarlo Ligabue left Reyer, twenty years of the family’s sports patronage came to an honourable close. Few others in the city had given so much to boost the fortunes of Venetian sport. The relationship had started in the early 1960s with Anacleto on the terraces of the old Pier Luigi Penzo stadium on Sant’Elena and ended in 1979 with Giancarlo Ligabue on the seats of the Palasport Arsenale which, a few decades later, unable to meet the safety standards, could not be used for the top flight, forcing Reyer to emigrate to the mainland.

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Giancarlo Ligabue and the Reyer basketball team during the construction of the sports hall at the Arsenale, 1977.

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A jump shot under the basket during a game in the A1 championship, 1971.

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Riccardo Ali

One hundred years signed Ligabue 189

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hen we think of the history of a company, we think of the people who made it great, the commitment that it took to transform an idea into reality, and both the good and more difficult moments. In short, we think of its evolution unfolding over a given period of time. If we look at the one hundred years of Ligabue’s history, we can easily imagine just how many things have changed and evolved in the world around and within the company.

In all of this, there is a detail, a symbol that is visible to everyone and silently narrates through a highly significant image the path taken by a company over the years: its logo.

Today, in the digital age, where communication is everything, we experience a continuous “overexposure to the image”. Just think of how many brands, characters, photos and graphic images pass by our eyes via our smartphones and tablets every day. Our language has changed and our relationship with companies, which have all become much closer to us, just a click away, has also changed.

But what preceded all of this? In the past hundred years how did Ligabue respond to the changing trends of the various periods? In short, how did it appear in public a hundred years ago? We will try to discover and understand, through a – in some ways romantic – journey into the corporate image of our brand, what our story has been, and envisage where we are going.

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An enlarged view of Anacleto Ligabue’s first business card, 1920s.

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The first Ligabue logo reproduced on writing paper, 1920s.

In the 1920s, the strong Art Deco influences were reflected in graphic communications and were certainly the dominant trend.

The Ligabue company image of this period is highly decorated and rich in details. The illustration accompanies and merges with the words “Anacleto Ligabue”, written in Gothic letters in Fraktur style, with the capital letters embellished by flourishes and floral signs. The characters chosen for the word “Venezia” come from the splendid letters of Lombardic capitals, here varied in lettering with many thicknesses to make them three-dimensional and internally decorated with textures.

Of course, at that time, the Art Deco taste was the style of picture houses, large bourgeois houses, railway stations and transatlantic liners, and as such perfectly in line with the corporate style of Ligabue.

Towards the end of the 1930s, the style of communication of the Fascist regime, and especially the bulletins posted on city noticeboards or the propaganda mural writings, removed gracefulness and added more severity to the graphic art of the period.

The soft, almost floral characters were replaced by rigid, angular, unadorned letters.

Alongside pronounced graceless round letters, angular letters appear with almost sharp points, as in the case of A, V, M or Z. This inevitably reminds us of the imagery

La grande impresa

1920-1940. The years between the two wars

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of typefaces in the graphic communications typical of the Futurist movement, which in those years enjoyed great popularity, mainly thanks to the work in advertising of Fortunato Depero, one of the greatest and most influential Futurist artists.

1950-1960. A decade of transition and recovery 162

Manual wall calendar, made of tin, 1970.

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A composition of logos from a hundred years of Ligabue, designed

by Riccardo Alì, 2019.

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Company logos from 1919 to 2005.

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Preparatory drawings for the creation of a new logo to mark the centenary, 2019.

In the post-war period, perhaps also due to the emotional factors involved in the desire for reconstruction and new beginnings, in the Ligabue corporate communications the need was felt to go back in time and attenuate the severity that had previously characterised the brand. It was a timid return to ornament and decoration.

For the name “Ligabue Anacleto”, the chosen typeface in some respects recalls a hand-written signature, almost signalling the wish to get closer to people and return, also in communications, to some human warmth, almost foreshadowing the “friendly mood” that we now all know in the age of social media.

The name Ligabue was thus written in a font stemming from British Copperplate, commonly known as English Roundhand. Created as a font to be engraved by hand, as the name “copperplate” suggests, it is characterised by a very striking harmonious combination of light and shade, a constant angle of 42° and the presence of slight flourishes in capital letters making the composition livelier. The result is a very elegant, refined writing that embellishes without encroaching and clearly highlights the brand. The descriptive part of the addresses and captions is, on the other hand, in the sans-serif characters that were all the rage in European printing at that time.

1970-1990. The economic and technological boom The taste of Ligabue’s communication graphics over the years also reflected the internationalisation of the company and laid the foundations for the style that brings us up to the present day.

Before describing the evolution of the logo, I would like to focus on a truly amazing detail when seen with contemporary eyes. As evidence of how Ligabue’s communication has always been very tuned into and sometimes even anticipated the times, in the 1970s one graphic element can’t fail to remind us, in terms of design and function, of what we now usually call an “icon”, like those on our mobile devices that we click to open apps.

Enclosed in circles and with a flat, unadorned graphic style but very distinctive and informative, the Ligabue “icons” represented the various business sectors of the company.

But let’s go back to the logo. The letters of the name are large, linear and clean cut and the graphics containing them are minimal – we are almost in the 1980s and the

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To mark the company’s 100th anniversary, it was decided that the Ligabue logo should be completely restyled, albeit while maintaining some affinities with the previous version. For this reason, the lower case and its characteristic style have been preserved, as can be seen in the two circumferences that design the letters through rhythmic repetitions. This rhythm recurs in the joint between the central body, the ascender and descender, in the G, A and B. The thicknesses are always conspicuous, as in the previous version: the idea is to convey solidity and concreteness.

The anchor is the least changed graphic element compared to the previous version, thus emphasising a natural historical continuity. It has, however, been modernised and redesigned in outline to detach it from the writing and so give greater visibility to both. The resulting logo will accompany all Ligabue communications in the coming years.

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One hundred anni firmati ligabue

advent of the cooler, starker digital world was beginning to make itself felt.

In addition to the aforementioned icons, in recent years, the word “Ligabue” is sometimes accompanied, depending on use, by matching monograms, in line with period images (LH – LE).

The dynamism is provided by the inclination of the character that was to grow smaller over the years, while that of the mass of the weight of the letters was to increase. Then from the 1980s to the present day, it remained constant and only small details of it were modified.

Starting from that decade, in a slow process of revision and refinement, the characters that form the Ligabue inscription, while remaining in their “bold” form, are slightly more widely spaced and redefined to make them more legible.

By shaping the eyelets in the letters A and E and improving the descender of the letter G, which previously could have been mistaken for a Q, we obtain the form that has been used for the last fifteen years, followed by the iconic anchor that has accompanied the name Ligabue for such a long time

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Acknowledgements I would like to thank all those who in different but always invaluable ways have contributed in practical terms to the project of La Grande Impresa, marking the Ligabue Group Centenary.

Archive and research work lasting over two years has enabled us to reconstruct a significant company history. A special, heartfelt thanks to Massimo Orlandini for his extraordinary, painstaking work of documentation and research. My deeply-felt admiration to Adriano Favaro for his passionate account of the Study and Research Centre and the Foundation today.

My thanks to Federico Dei Rossi and Luca Facchini of Ubis; they followed the creation of the project in all its details and are joint curators with me of the design of the exhibition’s historical itinerary.

Thanks to Claudia Ghedin for her important work of research, documentation and administration, Marta Dal Martello for her valuable archive research and for selecting the images, assisted by Petra Lanza, and Massimo Bortolazzo for his generous support to the team. I am also deeply grateful to Alessandro Marzo Magno for all his work as editor of this book.

I am indebted to Lucia Berti for her constant, indispensable support, always precise, effective and enthusiastic.

My friend Massimo Casarin carried out the crucial work of reconstructing the history of the Ligabue Group in the 1960s and ‘70s and has provided us with a remarkable portrait of Giancarlo Ligabue’s involvement in the company at that time. Fifty years of shared company life and friendship. I owe him my warmest gratitude.

Inti Ligabue

For the chapter on “Anacleto Ligabue” The essay is the preliminary result of a more extensive year-long research, carried out in Emilian and Venetian archives, to discover sources, materials and documentary traces that have contributed to enhancing the Ligabue family and business archives. I would like to thank all those who have helped me in any way to tell this great entrepreneurial story.

Massimo Orlandini For research in Emilia Roberto Baccarani, president of the historic Cantina Sociale di San Martino (Reggio Emilia) Michele Belleli, Istoreco, Istituto per la Storia della Resistenza e della Società Contemporanea, Reggio Emilia, for details and precise information on the 66th Infantry Regiment Alberto Bevilacqua and Elena Infanti, Servizi Demografici, Comune di Reggio Emilia, for the seemingly impossible task of searching for the unpublished sources concerning the Ligabue family in Reggio Emilia Adalgisa “Gisetta” Addario (née Camurani), Bologna, for valuable information on the family firms Ercole Camurani, Reggio Emilia, historian and journalist, who died recently Maria Carfìe and Valentina Soldani, State Archive of Modena, for finding Anacleto Ligabue’s national service registration card Casa della Carità, Villa Argine, especially sisters Emanuela Ferretti and Marta Gualdi, for providing practical examples of the philanthropic work of Zita and Anacleto; they still live at Villa Argine today Elisa Casoni, Ufficio Servizi Demografici del Comune di Cadelbosco di Sopra (Reggio Emilia) Claudia Cremaschi, Sara Bonini and Graziano Mazza, Ufficio Servizi Demografici Comune di San Martino in Rio (Reggio Emilia), who helped search for traces of the Mazzieri family Roberto De Pietri, a passionate collector and historian from Cadelbosco di Sopra (Reggio Emilia), for the material provided and his useful information, especially about Villa Argine; and with him the Associazione Amici di Valerio Belluzzi, Villa Seta, Cadelbosco di Sopra (Reggio Emilia) Fausto Gemmi, Carpi (Modena), collector, for his practical help in finding oral sources and documents Caterina and Chiara Giroldi and their mother Alba Gabbi, Villa Argine di Cadelbosco di Sopra (Reggio Emilia), for their help in searching for and viewing unpublished family photographic material concerning Anacleto Ligabue at Villa Argine Angelo Lugli, Carpi (Modena), collector and friend for as long as I can remember, my base camp for research in Emilia Paola Meschini, Archivio di Stato di Reggio Emilia, for an enlightening conversation and some valuable details Giovanna Ponzanelli, Istituto Professionale di Stato “G. Minuto”, Servizi per l’enogastronomia e l’ospitalità alberghiera di Marina di Massa (Massa Carrara), for valuable information about the holiday industry at Massa in the days of Anacleto Milo Spaggiari, Archivio Storico Diocesano di Reggio Emilia - Guastalla, for new sources concerning Anacleto’s birth and baptism Tania Tellini, Mayor of Cadelbosco di Sopra (Reggio Emilia), for her courteous help Ilaria Valentini, Associazione Amici di Valerio Belluzzi, Villa Seta di Cadelbosco di Sopra (Reggio Emilia), for the association’s publications of vital interest to our research Marco Vergnani, Servizi Bibliotecari, Biblioteca del Comune di San Martino in Rio (Reggio Emilia).

For the Veneto Daniele Angiolin, Ufficio Anagrafe Comune di Venezia: wholly reliable, as always, in identifying sources, even the most fragmentary, that enabled us to go to Emilia and successfully search for the “missing pieces” in the Ligabue family records Luca Benetti, Ufficio Documentale Comando Forze Operative Nord, Padua, for having accurately identified Anacleto’s national service registration card Giovanni Caniato, Archivio di Stato di Venezia, for his great help in looking for clues and documents Patrizia Geremia, Archivio Notarile di Venezia, for the incredible speed with which she found the deed of 1944 concerning the founding of the Ligabue company Maria Luisa Cortese (née Greggio), a former employee of Ligabue Catering SpA, Mestre (Venice), a close collaborator of Giancarlo Ligabue, and dear friend for many years, who provided indispensable information Sandra Martin, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venice Giorgio Roverato, Università di Padova, for scholarly help and invaluable advice Monica Selva, Archivio della Camera di Commercio di Venezia, Camera e Rovigo Delta Lagunare, Venice, for her great help in finding the Ligabue Chamber of Commerce records, for her advice and great professionalism Orietta Zanato, Università di Padova, for having shared every moment of the research and every discovery, and for having always too patiently put up with me.

An emotional thanks to my mother and my father who, in different but similar ways, with their story and their example, are always by my side and have enabled me to be the person I am today.

Thank you. Beyond space and time.

Inti

Previous page, Giancarlo Ligabue with his wife Sylvia in his study in the Palazzo Erizzo, Venice.

Above, a promotional wall calendar, made of tin, 1970s.

Colophon Book edited by Alessandro Marzo Magno Editorial team Lucia Berti Editorial coordination Marta Dal Martello Petra Lanza Archive and picture research Claudia Ghedin Research and documentation Essays by Inti Ligabue Alberto Clò Massimo Orlandini Massimo Casarin Adriano Favaro Sebastiano Giorgi Riccardo Ali Book design Federico Dei Rossi Ubis Design Workgroup Photographs Claudio Rocci Archives Gruppo Ligabue Fondazione Giancarlo Ligabue Ligabue Family Collezione Massimo Orlandini Archivio fotografico del Consorzio Culturale del Monfalconese Translated by David Kerr Published by Fondazione Giancarlo Ligabue Printed by Arti grafiche Conegliano Under the patronage of

Acknowledgements Autorità del sistema portuale del mare Adriatico settentrionale Camera di Commercio, industria, artigianato e agricoltura di Venezia - Museo Storia Naturale, d’Amico Società di Navigazione - Grimaldi Group - Onorato Armatori

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Printed in Italy September 2019 from Arti Grafiche Conegliano.