Raccontare l’impresa. Storie di imprenditori vicentini dal secondo dopoguerra a oggi, edited by D. Celetti and E. Novello, Padova, Cleup, 2006, pages 350, € 20,00 Review by Antonio Canovi

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Collecting autobiographies of entrepreneurs to tell the history of industrialization in Vicenza.
This was the objective of David Celetti ed Elisabetta Novello during a research for Cleup promoted with the support of the Study Center on business and on the industrial patrimony of the Chamber of Commerce of Vicenza.
The interviews collected are around thirty and give a significant picture of the meaning of “making business” in the Vicenza reality, with no equals in Italy as far as the varieties of goods is concerned (tanneries, stone products, engineering industries, textile, food industries, and jeweler’s art and so on). If there is a secret in the creation of what literature spread as the North-East model, the testimonies identify it in the family. The biggest merit of this volume is to “tell the business”, representing, with the necessary scientific criticality, the environmental characters which created it according to the spreading modalities that everybody sees in it.