A fire destroyed the building of la Rinascente only a few days after the opening. In the following days, Borletti’s words appeared in the local papers “Post fata resurgo (lit. After death I rise). La Rinascente, after the disaster that has hit the store of Piazza Duomo, will rise more beautiful, greater and stronger than before”.

Luigi and Ferdinando Bocconi started their entrepreneurial adventure at the bottom of the ladder, first as shop boys in Lodi and then as pedlars selling fabrics and clothing. It was a very old profession that not only came with hardship but also implied building relations and circulating information and ideas. It was also the starting point from which you could set up a store, experience that the Bocconi Brothers shared with many other important Italian retail businesses. During these years they were also involved in the events that brought about the unification of Italy: Luigi fought with Garibaldi and Ferdinando took part in the war against organised banditry.

The “Magazzini Bocconi” store was established in a period marked by urban change that brought about new and more modern business and social models. In 1832, the “Galleria De Cristoforis” was built in the style of the Parisian passages a lively shopping arcade lined with small shops and cafés under a glass dome. It was the forerunner of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II (1878) created by Giuseppe Mengoni. The number of businesses in the city centre multiplied: cafés, pubs and restaurants. Shops became more and more specialised according to the type of merchandise they sold. The attention paid to exhibiting and advertising products, in particular the skill of decorating shop signs and window displays, would soon become a real form of art in the twentieth century.

From the second half of the nineteenth century Milan started turning into the dynamic and modern city that we now know. The population growth was incredible and consequently the city started sprawling outwards. The structure of the city changed: while industrial sites further marked the suburbs, the city centre renewed its functions giving more predominance to services and commercial enterprises. The national exposition of 1881, in which the Bocconi Brothers took part with their own pavilion, and the universal exposition of 1906 provided Milan with the opportunity to manifest its industrial, commercial and cultural vocation, ever keen on new forms of modernity: products, fashion, technology, entertainment, commerce and advertising.

In 1865 the Bocconi Brothers opened their first clothes shop selling ready-to-wear garments. The shop was situated on the busy corner of Via Santa Radegonda and right from the start they showed how innovative they were by being among the first in Milan to use electric lighting to illuminate the small shop window as a way of attracting the attention of passers-by. From 1870 to 1877 they moved the business to Porta Nuova where they opened a stored called “Magazzino Livornese”. The ample space allowed the brothers to expand the range of merchandise. Here they introduced for the first time a fixed price, once again proving to be real forerunners.

In September 1877 the Bocconi Brothers leased the extremely modern Hôtel Confortable, which had been build right next to the new Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II by the Marquis Alessandro Flori in 1873 and they turned it into the headquarters of their retail enterprise. The “Aux Villes d’Italie” was hence established, soon after renamed “Alle città d’Italia”, the first Italian department store with its large rooms, wide range of products and, most importantly, goods that were put on display, clearly visible from the street and inside the store. The department store was much admired for its magnificent English Gothic hall.

The new building of the “Magazzini Bocconi” was inaugurated on 22nd October 1889. Construction work had started in 1887 and the building designed by the architect Giovanni Giachi was completed after two years of frenzied activity. With three sweeping façades, it stood in the same area next to the Duomo where now stands the present day la Rinascente, between Via San Raffaele and Via Santa Radegonda. Modern and functional, it was avant-garde in terms of design and retail space. The large and high windows set between iron columns, the vast rows of shelves facing the monumental central stair case and the profusion of merchandise on display made it the unequivocal model for the whole country.

“A real throng of thousands of people came for days from every part of the great capital of Lombardy and from the nearby towns and villages to see the new venue built by the Bocconi Brothers in Piazza Duomo to host their department store Alle città d’Italia. It was a general tribute of admiration for the grand and majestic outcome of the project. [...] Next to the magnificent creation of medieval mysticisms, by the monument made of marble, stood the large glass and iron building, an enormous shop, that in a single glance and turn of the eyes revealed all the details of its dynamic, hectic life” (Casa Bocconi, “LIllustrazione italiana”, 10 November 1889).

From 1869, the Bocconi Brothers started opening department stores in the main cities around the country. At the turn of the new century there were 9 branches: Milan, Rome, Genoa, Turin, Palermo, Naples, Venice, Florence and Bologna and a purchasing office in Paris. On 11th December 1887 the new store was opened in Piazza Colonna, Rome. Giulio De Angelis had designed the store and it represented the first building in Italy solely built for commercial purposes.

Right from the start, department stores were conceived as a visual spectacle so as to attract potential customers inside and make them enjoy the experience of shopping without having in mind anything in particular that they wanted to buy. The ample choice of goods, made-to- measure and ready-to-wear garments turned them into the favourite destination of the middle-classes, consisting of professionals and white-collar workers employed in public administration, commerce or industry, who entrusted their image to a company that was always up-to-date in terms of fashion and style and that was able to meet all their needs. The male and female sales assistants, there to serve customers, were the protagonists of the history of the “Magazzini Bocconi”, well known for their “good manners and their unchanging courtesy”.

New sales models implied the use of new marketing and advertising tools, the most important of these being the catalogue of the products. Created to meet the demands of mail-order businesses, catalogues soon became an important means of communication to update customers and a powerful advertising tool. But they also represented an opportunity to experiment visually and graphically with a progressively increasing number of images and pictures. The subsequent introduction of colour and photographs transformed the function of catalogues from being merely informative to sophisticated tools of persuasion.

As a result of the growth of the market for consumer goods, advertising started affirming itself as the new art of persuasions from the second half of the nineteenth century. The first classified advertisements consisting of just text appeared in the newspapers. These were soon replaced by adverts with drawings and sketches. Subsequently innovative printing techniques made it possible to create large spreads and colour prints. In addition to illustrated papers, which dominated as a means of marketing communication, other printed formats such as catalogues and posters were developed to advertise goods. The Bocconi Brothers, ever attentive to the latest methods, experimented with every means of communication to advertise their products, including dropping advertising flyers from a hot-air balloon.

In 2015, the year of Expo, we have celebrated our 150th anniversary from the time the Bocconi Brothers set up their retail enterprise. In 2017 we will celebrate the first 100 ye- ars of the brand named la Rinascente as conceived by Gabriele D’Annunzio for the new enterprise headed by Senatore Borletti. Over this last century and a half, la Rinascente has been the driving force behind modern retail strategies, fostered the birth of the brand “Made in Italy” as well as an instru- ment of democratization and a showcase for the new so- cial customs of the united and modern Italy.