The House of Gucci

by Sara G Forden

The rich history of the centuries-old Florentine merchant class pulsed in the Gucci veins. In 1293, the Ordinances of Justice defined Florence as an independent republic. Until the Medicis took power, the city was governed by arti, twenty-one merchant and artisan guilds. The names of these guilds remain today as street names: Via Calzaiuoli (shoemakers), Via Cartolai (stationers), Via Tessitori (weavers), Via Tintori (dyers), and many more. Gregorio Dati, a Renaissance silk merchant, once wrote: “A Florentine who is not a merchant, who has not traveled through the world, seeing the foreign nations and peoples and then returned to Florence with some wealth, enjoys no esteem whatsoever.”

  To the Florentine merchant, wealth was honorable and carried with it certain obligations, such as financing public buildings, living in a grand palazzo with gorgeous gardens, and sponsoring painters, sculptors, poets, and musicians. This love of beauty and pride in creating beauty has never died despite war, plague, floods, and politics. From Giotto and Michelangelo to the craftsmen in their workshops today, the fruits and flowers of the arts, propagated by merchants, have flourished there.

  “Nine out of ten Florentines are merchants, and the tenth is a priest,” joked Maurizio’s uncle, Aldo Gucci. “Gucci is as Florentine as Johnnie Walker is Scotch, and there’s not much that anybody can teach a Florentine about merchandising or craftsmanship,” he continued. “We Guccis have been merchants since around 1410. When you say Guccis, you are not thinking of Macy’s.”

  “They were simple people with an incredible humanity,” a former employee once said of the Guccis, “but they all had that terrible Tuscan character.”

  Maurizio’s own story starts with his grandfather, Guccio Gucci, whose parents struggled with their failing straw hat–making business in Florence at the end of the nineteenth century. Guccio fled his home and his father’s bankruptcy by signing on a freighter and working his way to England. There he found a job at London’s famous Savoy Hotel.* He must have gaped in amazement at the guests’ jewels and fine silks, and at the piles of luggage they brought with them. Trunks, suitcases, hatboxes, and more, all made of leather and embossed with crests and flourishing initials, overtook the lobby of the hotel, a mecca of high society in Victorian England. The guests were rich and famous or wanted to rub shoulders with those who were. Lillie Langtry, the mistress of the Prince of Wales, kept a suite for fifty pounds a year where she entertained her guests. The great actor Sir Henry Irving often came to dine in the restaurant, while Sarah Bernhardt claimed that the Savoy had become a “second home” to her.

  Guccio’s wages were low and the work hard, but he learned fast and the experience would have a profound effect on his life. It didn’t take him long to figure out that the people who came to the hotel brought with them possessions that showed their affluence and taste. The key to it all, he realized, lay in the piles of luggage that the bellboys spirited up and down the long carpeted hallways and in and out of the elevators, then called “ascending rooms.” The leather was something familiar; he knew it from the workshops of his Florentine youth. After he left the Savoy, according to his sons, Guccio found a job with Wagons Lits, the European sleeping car company, and toured Europe by train, serving and observing the wealthy travelers and their entourages of servants and luggage before returning to Florence four years later with his savings.

  Back at home, Guccio fell in love with Aida Calvelli, a dressmaker and daughter of a neighboring tailor. It didn’t appear to bother him that she already had a four-year-old son, Ugo, from a love affair with a man who had come down with terminal tuberculosis and was thus unable to marry her. On October 20, 1902, slightly more than a year after Guccio came back to Italy, he married Aida and adopted Ugo as his own. He was twenty-one; she was twenty-four. She was already pregnant with their first daughter, Grimalda, who was born three months later. Aida eventually gave Guccio four more children, of whom one, Enzo, died in childhood. The others were also boys: Aldo in 1905, Vasco in 1907, and Rodolfo in 1912.

  Guccio’s first job back in Florence was probably in an antiques shop, according to his son Rodolfo. Then Guccio moved to a leather firm, where he learned the basics of the trade before being promoted to manager. When World War I broke out, he was thirty-three years old with a large family: nevertheless, he was called up as a transport driver. When the war ended, Guccio, now working for Franzi, a leather crafts company in Florence, learned how to select raw hides, and studied curing and tanning as well as the art of working with different hides and grades of leather. He quickly became manager of the firm’s branch in Rome, to which he went alone. Aida, at home with the children, refused to leave Florence. Guccio came home every weekend and longed to open his own business in Florence catering to customers who understood finely made leather goods. One Sunday in 1921, during a stroll around Florence with Aida, he noticed a small shop for rent on a narrow side street, Via della Vigna Nuova, running between the elegant Via Tornabuoni and Piazza Goldoni on the banks of the river Arno. He and Aida started discussing the possibility of taking over the space. With Guccio’s savings, and, according to one account, a loan from an acquaintance, they founded the first Gucci company, Valigeria Guccio Gucci, which later became Azienda Individuale Guccio Gucci, a sole proprietorship, in 1921. Close to Florence’s most elegant street, Via Tornabuoni, the neighborhood was strategic for the kind of clientele Guccio hoped to attract. Between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, some of the city’s richest noble families—Strozzi, Antinori, Sassetti, Bartolini Salimbeni, Cattani, and Spini Feroni—had built fine palazzi along the Via Tornabuoni, where, starting in the 1800s, fancy restaurants and shops began opening up on the ground floors of their houses. The Caffè Giacosa, still there today, had been serving homemade pastries and drinks to its fashionable clientele since it opened at number 83r in 1815. Suppliers to Italy’s royal family, Giacosa first created the Negroni cocktail, named after a patron, Conte Negroni. The Ristorante Doney, founded in 1827 across from where Gucci would later open, catered to Florence’s aristocratic families and hosted the ladies’ counterpart to the all-male Florence Jockey Club. Next door, a florist shop, Mercatelli, served Florence’s aristocratic families. Other establishments still operating today include Rubelli, selling fine Venetian fabrics, the Profumeria Inglese, and Procacci, known for its mouthwatering truffle sandwiches. Wealthy European travelers stayed at the Albergo Londres et Suisse, which in turn wasn’t far from the American travel agency Thomas Cook & Sons, located at the corner of Via Del Parione.

  At first, Guccio bought high-quality leather products from Tuscan manufacturers as well as from Germany and England to sell to the tourists who flocked to Florence then, as they do today. Guccio selected sturdy, well-made bags and luggage at reasonable prices. If he didn’t find things he liked, he commissioned special pieces. He aspired to elegance himself and was always impeccably dressed in fine shirts and crisply pressed suits.

  “He was a man of great taste, which we all inherited,” recalled his son Aldo. “His imprint was on every item he sold.”

  Guccio opened a small workshop behind the store where he could make his own leather goods to supplement the imported products and also started an active repair business that quickly became profitable. He hired local craftsmen and built up a reputation for offering service in addition to reliable goods. Several years later, Guccio acquired a larger workshop across Michelangelo’s Santa Trinità Bridge on the opposite bank of the Arno along the avenue Lungarno Guicciardini. Guccio ordered his sixty craftsmen to work late into the night if necessary to fill the rising number of orders.

  The Oltrarno area south of the Arno had become home to many small workshops, which harnessed the river’s water to power machinery that treated and wove wool, silks, and brocades. The wide avenues bordering the river and the smaller streets leading south in this working-class neighborhood rang with sounds of hammering and sawing wood, washing and beating wool, and cutting, stitching, and polishing leather. Antiques dealers, framers, and other craftsmen also settled here. Just across the
river, the area around Piazza della Repubblica had become the commercial and financial heart of Florence, dating back to the Middle Ages when it was the headquarters of the powerful trade guilds that regulated the city’s thriving craftsmanship.

  As Guccio’s children grew, they began to work in the family business with the exception of Ugo, who showed little interest. Aldo had the keenest sense of trade, while Vasco, nicknamed Il Succube, “The Underdog,” took on responsibility for production, although he actually preferred hunting in the Tuscan countryside whenever he could. Grimalda, nicknamed La Pettegola, “The Gossip,” worked behind the counter in the shop alongside a young sales assistant Guccio had hired. Rodolfo was still too young to work in the shop; when he became older, he turned his nose up at the idea and followed his dream of working in films.

  Guccio ruled his children strictly and insisted they address him with the formal Lei, rather than the intimate tu. He demanded good behavior at mealtimes and used his napkin as a whip, flicking it at those who were out of line. When the family spent weekends at their country home outside Florence near San Casciano, on Sundays Guccio hitched up the horse to their wooden two-wheeled cart, loaded in Aida and all the children, and trotted them all off across the fields to morning mass.

  “He had a very strong personality and commanded respect and distance,” said Roberto Gucci, one of his grandsons. Thrifty, he ordered the side of prosciutto sliced as thinly as possible in order to make it last. He impressed these values on his children; it became family legend that Aldo would top off the bottles of mineral water from the tap. Guccio had his pleasures, too, and one of them was the hearty Tuscan food that Aida served up at the large family table. Perhaps because of the poverty he knew in his youth, Guccio let himself enjoy his later years and both he and Aida grew stout on her savory home cooking.

  “I will always remember him with his Havana cigar and the seemingly endless gold watch chain that girded his waist,” said Roberto.

  Guccio tried not to distinguish between Ugo and his natural children, but the boy didn’t seem to want to fall into the pattern set by his father and brothers and sister. His large size and tough manner earned him the nickname Il Prepotente, “The Bully,” from his brothers. When Ugo didn’t show any interest in helping out in the family shop, Guccio found him a job with one of his wealthy customers, Baron Levi, a successful landowner. Baron Levi employed Ugo as assistant manager of one of his farms on the outskirts of Florence. The situation seemed ideal for the brawny young man. Soon Ugo, who was already married, began boasting about how well he was doing. Guccio, still eager to pay off his early debt, asked Ugo for a loan. Ugo, in financial difficulty himself due to an extravagant girlfriend he was secretly courting, was too embarrassed to confess that he didn’t have the money and instead promised his father he would give him a loan. In the meantime, Guccio arranged a bank advance with which he paid off his loan. After paying back the bank, he agreed to repay Ugo over time, with interest. What he didn’t know was that Ugo, ashamed to admit to his father he wasn’t as successful as he claimed, had stolen 70,000 lire (the equivalent of about $3.50, a significant amount of money at the time) from Baron Levi’s cash box. He gave his father the 30,000 lire (about $1.50) he had asked for and ran off with the rest for three weeks with his girlfriend, a dancer who performed in the chorus of a small local theater.

  Baron Levi reported to Guccio his strong suspicion that Ugo had stolen from him, crushing Guccio’s joy at having paid off his partner at long last. He could hardly believe his son would resort to stealing, but a review of the facts left no doubt in his mind. He agreed to repay the baron at the rate of 10,000 lire (about 50 cents) a month.

  Ugo distressed his parents in other ways as well. In 1919, a young Benito Mussolini had founded the Fasci di Combattimento, the precursor to his Fascist Party, and by 1922, after Mussolini had already been elected to Parliament, the Partito Nazionale Fascista had attracted 320,000 members across Italy, including bureaucrats, industrialists, and journalists. Ugo joined up—perhaps in rebellion against Guccio—and became a local official. He then used his power to terrorize the baron and others in the neighborhood where he had once worked, arriving at all hours with groups of drunken friends, demanding food and drink.

  Meanwhile, Guccio struggled to make his business successful. In 1924, after two years of business, some suppliers who had let Guccio have goods on credit to launch his business were demanding payment. In turn, some of his own clients had not paid what they owed. The young merchant did not have enough cash to pay his bills. One night, in a closed-door meeting with his family and closest staff, a tearful Guccio told the small assembly he was going to be forced to close his shop.

  “Unless a miracle happens, I can’t stay open another day,” Guccio said.

  The strong, robust Guccio “looked like a man facing a death sentence,” recalled Giovanni Vitali, Grimalda’s fiancé. A local surveyor, he knew the family well, having gone to school with Ugo and later Aldo at the Roman Catholic College of Castelletti.

  Vitali, who worked in his father’s construction business, had put aside some savings for his future with Grimalda. He offered to help Guccio out. Guccio humbly accepted the loan, gratefully thanking his son-in-law-to-be for saving the small enterprise. During the following months, he paid Giovanni back in full. As business improved, Guccio expanded the workshop and encouraged his craftsmen to produce original articles for the shop. He identified skilled artisans and built a qualified team of leatherworkers who were more artists than laborers. They produced fine bags of delicate kidskin and genuine chamois, telescope purses with gussets on the sides, and suitcases inspired by the Gladstone bags Guccio had seen in his Savoy days. Other products included car robe carriers, shoe boxes, and linen carriers—in those days upper-class tourists traveled with their own bed linens.

  The business did so well that in 1923 Guccio opened another shop on Via del Parione and during the next few years expanded the shop on Via della Vigna Nuova. The shop changed its location several times in the history of the company, with the last at numbers 47–49, currently occupied by the Valentino and Armani boutiques.

  Aldo started working in the family business in 1925, at the age of twenty, delivering packages with horse and cart to customers staying at the local hotels. He also did simple shop tasks, such as sweeping and tidying, eventually helping with sales and rearranging the merchandise displays.

  Aldo’s knack for mixing work and pleasure was evident from the beginning. In addition to developing salesmanship skills, Aldo adeptly turned his contacts with pretty young female customers into exciting flirtations. An attractive young man with a lean figure, bright blue eyes, chiseled features, and a wide, warm smile, he quickly charmed the young women who stopped in the shop. Guccio appreciated the effect Aldo’s captivating manners had on the business and he closed his eyes to his son’s amorous escapades until one of his most prestigious clients, the exiled Princess Irene of Greece, came to the shop one day and asked to speak with him privately. Guccio ushered her into his office.

  “Your son has been seeing my servant,” she reproached him. “This must stop or I shall be forced to send her home. I am responsible for her.”

  Guccio was reluctant to tell Aldo which young women he could or couldn’t escort, but he did not want to offend such an important client. He called his son into the office for an explanation.

  Aldo had first met Olwen Price, a bright-eyed, red-haired girl from the English countryside at a reception at the British consulate in Florence. Olwen had also visited the shop during her rounds for her mistress. Daughter of a carpenter and trained as a dressmaker, she had been eager for the chance to go into service overseas as a ladies’ maid. She had entranced Aldo with her shy, modest manner, her musical English accent, and simple ways. He persuaded her to meet him privately and quickly discovered that her quiet demeanor hid an adventurous spirit; they soon became lovers, disappearing into the Tuscan countryside for their amorous retreats. Aldo quickly realized that
the relationship with Olwen was more than a passing flirtation. When Guccio and the princess confronted him, Aldo surprised them both, announcing that he and Olwen intended to marry.

  “From now on, Olwen is no longer your concern,” Aldo declared gallantly to the princess. “She is mine and I will take care of her.” He didn’t tell them that Olwen was already pregnant.

  Aldo brought Olwen home, placing her in the care of his older sister, Grimalda, while continuing to meet her for furtive excursions into the countryside. Aldo then followed her home to England to meet her family. They were married on August 22, 1927, in a little church in the English village of Oswestry, near Olwen’s hometown of West Felton, near Shrewsbury. He was twenty-two years old; she, nineteen. Their oldest son, Giorgio, whom Aldo always called il figlio del amore, his love child, was born in 1928. Two other boys followed: Paolo in 1931 and Roberto in 1932. The marriage wasn’t destined to be happy, however. Aldo’s and Olwen’s sweetheart escapades had thrilled them both, but settling down to family life in Florence was different. First, the couple had to live with Guccio and Aida, forcing Olwen to fit into Italian family life and submit to Guccio’s strict, commanding style. They all crammed into the elder Guccis’ apartment on Piazza Verzaia, near the old stone San Frediano entrance to the once-walled city. After they moved into their own home on Via Giovanni Prati on the outskirts of Florence, tensions eased for a while. Olwen dedicated herself entirely to the three boys, while Aldo became more and more involved in the family business. She never learned Italian well, was painfully shy, and had a hard time making friends. As he began to expand his horizons through the business, she grew fiercely possessive and resentful.

  “Aldo loved life, but she put a damper on anything he wanted to do,” recalled his older sister, Grimalda. “She never let him take her out anywhere, always making the excuse of having to look after the children. It wasn’t what he married her for at all.”