He passed away in recent days at his home in Trieste, at the age of 94, Giuseppe Perissinotto, one of the great old men of the Generali group, one of the founders of Genagricola, which under his leadership became the first Italian agricultural company, and a leading figure in national agriculture.
Generali and the land were his great passions, in addition to his family made up of his wife, a journalist daughter and Giovanni Perissinotto who was Generali's CEO for 11 years. The then president of Generali, Cesare Merzagora, affectionately and esteemed him as "The Farmer".
Giuseppe Perissinotto, who was born in 1925 in San Donà di Piave, was graduated with honors in Agricultural Sciences in Bologna and his teachers had promised him a brilliant university career. But his vocation was another: to work in the fields and apply his knowledge to the modernization of agriculture. As in 1948 he applied for employment at Generali where he began working on a farm in Tuscany as a labourer, something he was very proud of, recalling that his was truly "a very hard apprenticeship". But his passion and his expertise were soon noticed by the president of Generali, Cesare Merzagora, who in 1964 appointed him director in charge of the entire agricultural sector of the group and it was in this capacity that ten years later, in 1974, Perissinotto was among the founders of Genagricola, subsequently becoming general manager, managing director and president.
Perissinotto gave an unmistakable impetus to the growth and modernization of Generali's agricultural empire, helping to make Genagricola, in which all the farms of the winged lion were concentrated, the first Italian farm, which today has 26 farms for a total of 15 hectares, of which 900 are vineyards, 2 hectares are natural forest and 9 head of cattle. The diversification of the productions that he achieved was decisive and above all the international expansion in particular in Romania where he bought 5 thousand hectares of land at bargain prices, which today are worth gold.
Nominated Cavaliere del Lavoro by the then President of the Republic Sandro Pertini, Giuseppe Perissinotto, who up until a few years ago never missed Generali shareholders' meetings, received an honorary degree in Economic Sciences from the University of Trieste in 2012. "The tasks to which the new agriculture is called to undertake - he said in the Lectio magistralis - and that is to eradicate hunger in the world and contribute to supplying clean energy to industry, are fascinating and capable of attracting new capital and new brains". It was the mission to which he dedicated his whole life.
