Arnoldo Mondadori

Early years and family

Arnoldo Mondadori was born in Poggio Rusco, Mantua, in 1889, he was the third of six children of Domenico Secondo, an illiterate itinerant shoemaker, and Ermenegilda Cugola. The family struggled financially. Ermenegilda, as recalled, was forced to count candles that allowed her son to read in the evening: Arnoldo was the most curious among the kids and took every opportunity to read. After the fifth grade of elementary school, he was forced to stop his studies and start working. He was considered lucky, because his brothers had stopped after the third grade. In 1897, the family moved to Ostiglia, where the father had opened an osteria. Later, he began earning a living by working at a grocery store in town, then he worked as a peddler with a horse-drawn cart, and finally, thanks to his soothing voice, as a narrator of intertitles at the town movie theater. From this last experience, he would carry with him for the rest of his life the nickname "Incantabiss" ("snake charmer") because of his deep voice and great powers of persuasion.

At the age of 17, he became an apprentice of a typographer Manzoli. In his own words, it was ‘an old, outdated print shop in Ostiglia, where dust completely covered the type cases, and the hand press lay idle most of the time because the owner had no desire to work; and so I began dusting, learning to set type, and printing.’ There, in 1907, he founded ‘La Sociale’, an enterprise that would later become Mondadori Publishing House.

In 1906, Mondadori won a prize of 5 lire in books for a short story that he had published in Letture per la gioventù magazine, edited by E. Novelli. The event marked the beginning of a journey of self-education that characterized his entire life.

In 1906-1907, with a group of friends Mondadori founded a monthly magazine Luce: giornale popolare istruttivo. With the help of an investor from Banca Agricola Mantovana and his father’s signature (since he was not yet of legal age), he purchased the "Manzoli" printing house in 1907, renamed it "La Sociale," and began printing custom forms, invoices, and letterheads, and hired his siblings Dina and Remo, to work with him.

Mondadori's career as a publisher officially started in 1912 when he published his first book: Aia Madama, a collection of folk tales and customs by the Ostiglia-born writer Tommaso Monicelli. Monicelli became a friend, a valuable collaborator and even a relative as he married Mondadori's sister Andreina in 1913. The title marked the beginning of a collection of children's books ‘La Lampada’, which enjoyed huge commercial success. In the early 1915, Mondadori received a 2000 square meter former factory building in Ostiglia from the city government. He equipped the new premises with 10 printing presses, 1 linotype and a small stereotype printing machine. He began collaborating with the military and printed periodicals such as La Ghirba, La Tradotta, Il Cavallo di Frisia, and Le Fiamme Nere, as well as stationery and printed materials for the army and propaganda leaflets. He also increased his production of fiction and schoolbooks and educational materials which grew both in both quantity and quality. In November 2017, Mondadori invested the earned money into an acquisition of Tipografia Franchini, a printing house in Verona.

In 1921, Arnoldo Mondadori bought a 14,000 square meter factory building in via San Nazaro, Verona, for 450,000 lire. All the printing equipment from the old premises of the former Francini printing house and from Ostiglia was moved to Verona. At this point, his company counted more than 250 employees.

In 1925, Mondadori received the Order of Merit for Labour.

After the First World War, Mondadori launched many successful book series. Of particular importance wereI libri gialli (‘the yellow books’), launched in 1929. The series of crime novels, released weekly, had a characteristic design with a yellow front cover background. The series was so successful and influential that it gave its name to an entire genre. In 1933, Mondadori launched Meduza (collana), a series dedicated to modern foreign literature, introducing to Italian public such writers as John Galsworthy, Aldous Huxley, Francois Mauriac, André Maurois, Pearl S. Buck, Thomas Mann, André Gide, and others.

In 1935, through an agreement with Walt Disney, the publishing house began the publication of children's magazines based on Disney comics characters, which ran until 1988, when the agreement between Mondadori and the Walt Disney Company ended. After several warnings, in 1941 the government prohibited to publish pages with Mickey Mouse (Topolino in Italy), but Mondadori managed to negotiate his way through it and substitute Mickey with Tuffolino, an anthropomorph character created byartists Federico Pedrocchi and Pier Lorenzo De Vita.

In 1913, he married Andreina Monicelli, the sister of Tommaso Monicelli. The couple had four children: Alberto (1914-1976), Giorgio (1917-2009), Laura (1924-1991), and Cristina (1934-2015). Both Alberto and Giorgio later joined the family business as managers.

In the mid-1920s, Mondadori was looking for a summer residence for his family. In Meina, near Arona, a small town on lago Maggiore, he bought a late 19th-century Art Nouveau building that once belonged to the musician and conductor Luigi Mancinelli, and rebuilt it into a 1,400 square meter 4-storey villa. Called La Verbanella, the villa had more than 50 rooms and 20 bedrooms to host all members of the big family and frequent guests and collaborators of Arnoldo Mondadori, including Thomas Mann, Georges Simenon, Ernest Hemingway, Eugenio Montale, and many more. In 2019, the villa was purchased by Donatella Versace.

Valentino Bompiani, who worked along Mondadori for more than five years as a secretary and later as a fellow editor, recalled him as ‘a man of great grace and elegance, full of patience and tact. He was also a very down-to-earth person who wasn't ashamed to ask for help when necessary.’

Mondadori's incredible career was marked with a life-long rivalry with Angelo Rizzoli. They were born two days apart in late 1889 and died eight months apart, both at the age of eighty-one. Both started as typographers and came from very poor families. Mondadori routinely referred to Rizzoli as "that gangster," while Rizzoli reportedly refused to even say Mondadori's name out loud.

From the surviving family correspondence, it is clear that Arnoldo had an authoritarian, domineering personality, and this often complicated his relationship with Alberto. On the one hand, he wanted his eldest son to be like him; on the other hand, he was not willing to accept his son’s decisions.