Carlo Gatti

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Carlo Gatti's tomb in the city cemetery of Bellinzona

Carlo Giuseppe Nazaro Gatti (born on July 27, 1817 in the hamlet of Marogno (then part of Dongio , now part of Acquarossa ); died on September 6, 1878 there ) was a Swiss-British entrepreneur and liberal politician from the Italian-speaking canton of Ticino . He was a pioneer of ice cream production in England.

Life

Carlo Gatti was born in 1817 as the son of the chestnut dealer Stefano Gatti (1776–1842) and Apollonia De Righetti as the youngest of six children in the hamlet of Marogno, a little south of Dongio. The family had local citizenship, that is, they were entitled to vote in the vicinanza , and belonged to the so-called patriciate, which had extensive rights of self-determination since the common rule . The family owned modest land holdings and individual members were given positions as priests and lawyers. Carlo only had a basic education. It is said that he was hardly interested in the lessons and stayed away after being beaten by the village school teacher Don Giacomo Martinoli. He then emigrated to Paris at the age of 12 or 13 to work as a chestnut seller.

The Blenio Valley , where chestnuts grew in a mixed forest economy called Selva , has been shaped by the seasonal emigration of men since the beginning of modern times, but this was by no means always due to poverty. In 1743, for example, 815 men between the ages of 18 and 60 were absent from home, which was 47% of all male adults; however, individual villages achieved shares of up to 93%. Still mainly active in Milan in the 18th century , after 1848/1849 it was difficult for them to settle in Lombardy , and they increasingly turned to France, Belgium and England. Combined with the income of the women who worked at home with the children and farmed the household, whom the men came to help in the summer, this was often a very lucrative way of life.

In memory of the descendants of Carlo Gatti in London

In 1839 the 22-year-old Carlo Gatti married the young Maria Marioni from Castro , who worked in her father's café in Paris. At that time, the Gatti and Righenzi families ran the Magasin de Marrons de Lyon, de Luc, Turin et de toutes espèces store at 84 rue Montmartre in Paris. To the great relief of his brothers, who were concerned about his unstable way of life and his gambling debts, Gatti decided to go to England, where he arrived on July 2, 1847. In London , he began operating a coffee shop, where he also sold chestnuts in winter . He lived in the poor, mostly Irish immigrant district of Holborn in the local Italian colony. In 1849 he joined forces with the chocolatier Battista Bolla and founded a permanent coffee house.

From 1850, now with two branches, the company also had its own chocolate production . The in-house cocoa roasting at Gatti & Bolla's took place in the shop window, attracting the public. Inside the restaurant, sweets were sold and hot drinks and meals were served. As an additional attraction, for the first time in England, ice cream was offered at affordable prices . Business at Holborn Hill 129 and Hungerford Market went well, so that Gatti's brothers Giuseppe and Giovanni gave up their work in Paris and moved to London, also because the chestnut business was in crisis as a result of a plant disease .

Ice cream in London 1877

The brothers brought their capital from the business they sold. This enabled semi-industrial chocolate production to be set up with the help of a steam engine . Despite setbacks, such as the fire in the Hungerford Hall market hall on March 31, 1854 (Gatti was insured and then had improved liquidity ), the business prospered. Carlo Gatti expanded into the natural ice cream trade with Norway in 1857 and established a collaboration with Johan Dahll from Kragerø . In Norway, the ice was sawn out of the lakes in spring and, with growing demand, "cultivated" on artificially flooded land. It reached Gatti's warehouses and its own distribution in London by ship and rail. Carlo Gatti arranged for numerous compatriots to follow suit to work in his factories. In the Strand Area , in Holborn, Lambeth and Islington , a real Ticino colony emerged. Chocolate making and ice making were traditional professions in the Blenio Valley (see Cima-Norma ) and in the neighboring town of Biasca .

Gatti owed much of its wealth to this trade. The offer now also included the luxurious Royal Adelaide Gallery Restaurant on King William Street, which the family took over from its previous owner and ran until 1939. It had a large kitchen and offered space for hundreds of guests. The Gattis also entered the entertainment business in 1865. The Gatti's Palace of Varieties (Gatti's over the Water) on Westminster Bridge Road and Gatti's in the Arches ( Gatti's on the Strand ) on Villers Street in Charing Cross were popular meeting places for the fun-loving Londoner Jeunesse dorée . A hall with 30 billiard tables was open to the guests . These establishments also served to market Gatti's confectionery production. The Charing Cross Music Hall on Villers Street still exists today.

Left the house where Gattis was born; in the middle his own villa; on the right in the background the house of his brothers

In 1871 Carlo Gatti married the 23-year-old Marietta Andreazzi in a second, childless marriage and then spent more time in Ticino, where he had returned again and again throughout his career. In 1867 he was elected as a liberal to the Ticino cantonal parliament, in which, however, he hardly appeared until 1875. Despite his British citizenship from May 1858, he continued to feel connected to his origins, where in 1865 he added a villa to the house where he was born. He and his family also invested part of his fortune in 1870 in the purchase of a country estate in Hendon near London and in the castle Castello di Tabiano near Parma , which was expanded to a luxurious extent .

Carlo Gatti died in Dongio and was buried in the Bellinzona cemetery. Of six children (five daughters and one son who died as a child), three reached mature adulthood. Descendants of the Gattis had a major influence on the London entertainment business ( Adelphi Theater and Vaudeville Theater) well into the 20th century and were also active in the energy sector (Charing Cross & Strand Electricity Supply Company) and in the politics of England and Switzerland. Another branch of the family now lives in Italy. During World War II several of the business premises were destroyed in attacks by the German Air Force and the United Carlo Gatti, Stevenson and Slaters Company was dissolved in 1981. The construction of the Lukmanier Pass road , which connected the Blenio Valley with the Canton of Graubünden from 1877 onwards , goes back in part to his initiative. The street through his birthplace Marogno is named after him today.

Photo of the castle around 1950 in black and white: View of the outside staircase and the building wings.
The Castello di Tabiano around 1950
Blocks of ice are transported onto a sailing ship via two slides.
Ice loading in Norway
The most common occupations of emigrants from the Blenio Valley in 1872
Chestnut seller 982
Operator of coffee and chocolate bars 130
Errand boys and house servants 30th
Merchants ( groceries ) 20th
Auxiliary worker 14th
Cooks and waiters 12
Glaziers and glassblowers 11
Merchants (fruit and vegetables) 10

Literary reception

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Klaus Burri: Switzerland Suisse Svizzera Svizra - Geographical considerations . 2nd Edition. Lehrmittelverlag des Kantons Zürich, Zürich 1998, ISBN 3-906719-80-4 , p. 273 .
  2. ^ André Holenstein, Patrick Kury , Kristina Schulz : Swiss migration history - from the beginning to the present . Hier und Jetzt Verlag, Baden 2018, ISBN 978-3-03919-414-8 , p. 75 f .
  3. ↑ Marco Volken , Remo Kundert: Mountain hiking in Ticino . AT Verlag, Aarau and Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-03800-356-4 , p. 29 .
  4. ^ Robert Savary: Carlo Giuseppe Nazaro Gatti. In: Find A Grave . June 19, 2016, accessed December 24, 2018 .
  5. ↑ a b Thomas Blubacher: Instructions for use for Ticino . Piper Verlag, Munich 2019, ISBN 978-3-492-27723-5 , pp. 84 ff .
  6. ^ Felicity Kinross: Coffee and Ices - The story of Carlo Gatti in London . Lavenham Press, London 1991, ISBN 0-9517745-0-6 , pp. 10-15, 21 f., 28-31, 34-49, 52 f .
  7. ^ Giacomo Corazza Martini: Carlo Gatti re del ghiaccio - Un pronipote affascinato e riconoscente . Gangemi Editore, Roma 2017, ISBN 978-88-492-3475-6 , pp. 9-55 .
  8. ^ Daniela Pauli Falconi: Carlo Gatti. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
  9. ^ A b Marco Marcacci, Fabrizio Viscontini: La Valle di Blenio e la sua Ferrovia - L'ingresso nella modernità . Salvioni Edizioni, Bellinzona 2011, ISBN 978-88-7967-283-2 , p. 37, 208 .
personal data
SURNAME Gatti, Carlo
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Nazaro Gatti, Carlo Giuseppe (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss-British entrepreneur and politician
DATE OF BIRTH July 27, 1817
PLACE OF BIRTH Marogno
DATE OF DEATH September 6, 1878
Place of death Dongio