Gianni Mazzocchi

Provenance and early years

Gianni Mazzocchi was born on the same day as Alec Issigonis. He was born in Ascoli Piceno, a regional capital across the mountains to the north-east of Rome. His father died in 1933, when he was 27. The family had become prosperous over the years through the silk industry. His father had at one stage been a breeder of silk worms. His grand parents had died in the postwar flu pandemic. Before his father died the family had been destroyed: Gianni's mother was in poor health and his sister was "in and out of nursing homes". The family business had, in the words of one source, been "stolen" by a clever trickster, the father of one of Gianni Mazzocchi's school contemporaries. Only his father's gambling debts remained.

On leaving school he won a scholarship to study Jurisprudence at Rome. He then broke off his studies and moved to Milan in 1927, partly in response to his family's intensifying financial difficulties and partly in response to a conviction that the job opportunities in Lombardy would be much better than those on offer in Central Italy. He later recalled that "the only way to get out was to go north... I had 640 lire in my pocket and forty thousand in debts. I had this crazy idea to come to Milan" Very soon after arriving in Milan he met Father Giovanni Semeria who offered him, initially, work as a typist in connection with publishing and book trading work undertaken to support the "Opera nazionale per il Mezzogiorno d'Italia", a church-backed organisation devoted to running a network of orphanages and other institutions designed to alleviate the extreme poverty that was a feature of southern Italy. The work enabled Gianni Mazzocchi quickly to become involved with the city's network of publishers and book traders. In his typing job he immediately drew attention to himself through his precision and accuracy, and he was soon offered a permanent position worth 600 lire a month: he was able to start paying off his debts.