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VICTOR CIVITA
The problem solver

Where others saw crisis, he saw opportunities. He thus built the country’s biggest publishing house

by Roberto Pompeu de Toledo

Vostro padre è impazzito.

New York, September 1949. The boys have just come home from school. The mother calls them and reads the letter she has just received from the father, absent from home for more than two months. Sell this, give that, the letter said. Do not forget this, pay attention to that. Wrap the rest and come. The mother finishes and has the reaction every other woman would have on receiving a similar correspondence: "Vostro padre è impazzito". Yes, daddy is divenuto pazzo. He has lost his mind. He has gone nuts.

The father in question was the Italian, or, more fittingly, Milanese, born in New York, Victor Civita; the mother, the Roman Sylvana; and the boys, the couple’s two children, Roberto, aged 13, and Richard, aged 10. “Wrap the rest and come." Go where? Brazil, this was the order. Even though the family was accustomed to moving, the leap was frightening. Up until not, their displacements had been limited to the more recognizable and safe world of the Northern Hemisphere. Basically, the Italy-United States axis. Now the order was to go far away, to a distant land of which they had no references, of which they were not acquainted with the language or the codes. For whoever it is, such change is no little matter. It is an invitation to hold one’s breath and leap in the dark. Even more considering, as in the present case, the fact that the head of the family responsible for such decision was no boy. He was already 42 years old. All proves to be less surprising, however, when we take into account the deep nature of the character. For this Mr. Victor Civita, the pazzo of the letter, was, as we will see in the course of this story, an expert in taking leaps in the dark.

The chapters

• Embarking on the future
• Behind the baritone
• Headed for the US
• “Like fish in the water”
• "Female elements"
• Recipe for everything
• The first to arrive
• In the Ferris wheel
• The first plane

Embarking on the future

Five months later, the family arrived in Brazil, where the husband and father was waiting. Another five months and the first issue of Donald Duck appeared. It was the birth of Editora Abril. It was all very fast. It was all very fast with him. "Visionary" – that was the champion qualifying term when partners, collaborators, employees, friends or acquaintances referred to Victor Civita.

"Doer", "problem-solver", where the vice-champions. The former director of Abril’s fascicules, Pedro Paulo Poppovic, says that he “did not fit into his own skin, due to so much vitality”. He was a professional of enthusiasm. Cláudio de Souza, one of the oldest employees, described, in an article he published on the death of Civita, the interview he had with him when he applied for a vacancy in the young company, in February 1951. The venue was the 9th floor of number 118 of rua João Adolfo [street], in the center of São Paulo, Abril’s address at the time. Everything seemed to Cláudio to be very simple and quiet. Not more than three people were working in the two or three rooms he passed through. For someone who, as applicant for the vacancy offered, was used to the bustle of editorial rooms, the place reminded him of a convent. When he got to Civita, the latter welcomed him standing. And he talked, talked and talked – “practically without stopping for breath”, wrote Cláudio. “When I realized what he was trying to transmit to me”, he adds, “I deemed at first that he was talking of another and hectic publishing organization, and not of that his quiet association, from which only a modest magazine printed in typography came out”. Cláudio de Souza concludes that that crazy speaker was already "totally Embarking on the future".

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Behind the baritone

Victor Civita, despite being the son of a family of old Italian roots, was born in New York – at number 6, Charles Street, district of Greenwich Village, for an admirable reason: because the father, Carlo Civita, went running after the daughter of the baritone. Carlo Civita was an orphan raised by two aunts, teachers in Mantova. One day he went to Milan ad became a millionaire, but before becoming a millionaire, he met Vittoria, daughter of a baritone of some renown, Michelangelo Carpi, whose repertoire included a praised Figaro in "The Barber of Seville". One day, Carpi was invited to give lectures in a Chicago reservoir, and moved there with his family. Carlos followed, so as not to lose Vittoria, and married her in the United States, where the couple had the first two of the three children: César, born in 1905, and Victor, in 1907 – February 9, 1907. In 1909, only two years after the birth of the second child, the family made the crossing back to Italy, and established itself in Milan.

The third child, Arthur, would be born there, in 1912, while Carlo Civita engaged in a multifaceted carrier of entrepreneur. Among other things, he had a milk packaging plant and a company that imported equipment for gas stations. The son Victor did not stand out in his studies. He did not obtain more than one secondary course certificate, at Instituto Técnico de Estudos Comerciais, in Milan. At home, among other exciting activities, the Civita boys fulfilled the annual ritual of transferring to the bottles that Carlo Civita usually bought in casks the wine for the twelve months of the consumption by the family. After, they would stick labels on the bottles, specifying in them the origin of the wine and the year of the harvest. Outside the home, one of Victor’s programs were the operas of the Alla Scala Theater, in Milan, where his father had a permanent box. There, he learned the songs that, were he not already grandson of the baritone, he would sing. When the time came to provide military service, he enlisted in the Italian Air Force. He got to pilot open planes, of the type used in World War I. At the age of 20, his father gave him a ticket to the United States, put one thousand dollars in his pocket and commanded: "You’re on your own". It was his university. He wandered through 27 American cities, in the course of twelve months, visited factories, became acquainted with businesses and customs. On his return, he took up growing tasks in his father’s business. During vacation in Venice, he lodged in a hotel from Lido and met Sylvana Alcorso, daughter of a rich trader from Rome. They got married in 1935. And thus life went, loose, comfortable, as sweet as could be, for people born in families allocated by good energies and good possessions, until…

Until, you can guess, the clouds that foreshadowed World War II appeared in the horizon. Add to this the fact that both Civita and Alcorso were Jewish. Thus began for the Jews the insane, barbarous, absurd trial of the racial laws of the Mussolini regime. The Jews were forbidden to marry non-Jews, to work for the government, give lectures, from… Such an absurd legislation that at first no one believed it was for real. The government even forbade the Jews from being employed by non-Jews. The Roman house of the Alcorso counted on the services of fifteen employees, all non-Jews. There was the gardener, the driver, the cleaning and kitchen staff. It seemed, to those who have watched the movie of Vittorio De Sica, like the mansion that appears in ‘The Garden of the Finzi Continis’ – who were parents not of the Alcorso but of the Civita. No employee wanted to go away. However, the housewife, known as Nini (Sylvana’s mother) ended up losing her patience and she herself decided to leave. She traveled to Paris, with no husband or anyone. The months passed, the family asked her to return, to no avail. She did not return. On the side of the Civita, the patriarch Carlo, while visiting the United States, read one day in the New York Times the article in which a scientist – yes, “scientist”, stated that the Italian Jews could not be regarded as Italian. How so? And what did it mean to be educated in the Italian language, at the opera, in the literature of Dante and Petrarca, in the cult of Garibaldi and in the admiration of the works of Leonardo and Michelangelo? The absurd was exceeding all bounds. Carlo decided to leave.

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Headed for the US

From his side, the couple Victor-Sylvana, which by this time already had their son Roberto, born in 1936, left in the beginning of the fatidic year of 1939. They initially went to London, where Sylvana arrived pregnant, and hiding her pregnancy, since the British authorities preferred to prevent foreign children from being born in their territory and thus, according to the law of jus solis, be entitled to British citizenship. The son Richard would be born in London (and would, yes, be entitled to British citizenship), but the family did not wait long for leave. They went to France, and from there left for the United State, in the Rex, the most famous Italian ship at the time. For those who remember another classic of Italian cinema, Amarcord, by Federico Fellini, the Rex is the ship that, in a beautiful scene, passes afar from Rimini, the city where the story is set, to the great admiration of the local population, which, even though it was at night, enter the sea in small boats to see that wonder closer. The Rex was the pride of the Italian industry – or as is stated in the movie, “la grande realizzazione del regime". The Civita went on their last trip. The apocalypse followed – over Europe, over the transatlantic routes, over the world.

In the United States, the family would remain for ten years. Not that Victor Civita had any bad luck. He engaged in a thin packaging plant – for perfumes, especially, and was able to, being the good salesman he had always been, obtain a small equity interest in the business. However, he was not fulfilled. He wanted more out of life. In the summer of the Northern Hemisphere of 1949, the world had already left the nightmare of the war, and the family went vacationing in Italy. The idea was to satisfy one’s nostalgia and make the children get to know the land of their ancestors. In Italy, Victor reunited with his brother César, also on vacation. César had set himself up, since the start of the 40s, in Argentina. There, he had founded a certain Editorial Abril, whose symbol was a tree, and had launched a small magazine called El Pato Donald. César, who at an early age had gone to work at Mondadori, one of the biggest publishing houses in Italy, had become responsible there for the Italian version of the Disney magazines. When the war came, he had looked for Walt Disney, in the United States, and obtained from him a license to publish the magazines in South America. He set himself up in Buenos Aires and business went well, but the directions of Peronist Argentina were a cause of concern to him. A populist leader, who gathered growing powers, mobilization of masses, an appeal to the national pride that bordered on xenophobia, he had the impression that he had watched this movie before. In his talk with Victor, during that summer in Italy, César said he was thinking of diversifying his business. Brazil, there beside Argentina, seemed promising.

What if we tried? What if the brother agreed in engaging in a Brazilian venture? Victor decided to suspend his vacation and go right then, with César, to South America. With him, as we know, everything was very fast. He went first to Argentina to get to know Editorial Abril. From there he went to Rio de Janeiro, and later to São Paulo. He liked São Paulo more. The city was more after the manner of a Milanese. They told him that setting up a publishing house in São Paulo would fail. It was a province. There were no journalists, graphic artists, the resources required for the sector. Victor insisted, and the rest you already know. It is summarized in that famous letter, sent to New York, to where the family had already regressed, and in the sentence that crowned it: "Vostro padre è impazzito".
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"Like fish in water"

Victor Civita set himself up in a small room at Rua Líbero Badaró [Street], in the center of São Paulo, he hired a secretary, got a telephone and got to work. The family’s residence was the Hotel Esplanada, the noblest in the city, behind Teatro Municipal, where Grupo Votorantim is headquartered today. The 12th of July 1950 saw the first issue of O Pato Donald.

Civita had, for the venture that was then starting, US$ 500 thousand in own resources. Besides the loans he obtained, the Smith de Vasconcelos and, especially, Gordiano Rossi, a man from Minas Gerais the son of Italians who would be his partner in the first decades of Abril, entered as partners. Every company that grows a lot, when it returns to its origins and sees how small and unimportant it was, causes surprise, but in the case of Abril, the surprise was bigger. Civita was a newcomer, without the experience of the country, without knowing who commanded and who obeyed, where things were, what the best path was to take for this or that… Even the publishing field was foreign to him. However, already during those first months, he behaved, in the words of his son Roberto, “like fish in water". In 1951, he moved from Rua Líbero Badaró to João Adolfo, where Abril - diretoria e redações, would remain until the building at Marginal do Tietê became ready in 1968.

Also in 1951, he inaugurated his first press, at Rua Nova dos Portugueses [Street], district of Santana. He began to frequent there everyday. On Saturdays, he would take the envelopes with the staff’s payment and distribute it personally. In this first year, the press had twelve employees. Each received a gift in the Christmas of 1951, a panettone and a bottle of Cinzano. In the early morning, one time or another, Civita would go to Antônio Prado square, where he would meet the newsboys to get his shares of the newspapers, right there, on the street. He would tell them of the virtues of O Pato Donald and ask them to display it well on the stands. He knew them by name. Out of all of them, he became closer to Pedro Favalle, whom he met in those first years and whom would later be hired as newspaper supplier to Abril, a task he performs up until today. He also prospected the market, in the attempt to expand his space. The publicist Mauro Salles had his first contact with Victor Civita while working as journalist in O Globo, where he had a column on automobiles. A man holding a small folder entered the editorial room. “Know who I am”, the man asked. “I do. You are the editor of the most sold periodical in Brazil". At that time, O Pato Donald had surpassed its competitors. Victor Civita was satisfied to see himself and his work recognized. He opened the small folder and showed the Pato. He talked about the plan of making an automobile magazine. At the end, Salles asked if he did not want to be taken to Roberto Marinho, the owner of O Globo television. "No", Civita replied. “Not yet”. Mauro Salles remained with the impression that he wanted more time to be able to talk on an equal level with other Brazilian editors. Back to Rua João Adolfo, Civita asked Cláudio de Souza to correct his Portuguese. A difficult task. To correct a person “whose thoughts flew well ahead of his expression”, wrote Cláudio, proved to be burdensome for both. “Many times, an absolutely non-deferrable correction would cut his thinking, and he would become exasperated”. At home, on that occasion, before, after and always, he spoke Italian. His children, raised in the United States, had the tendency to fall into English, but the mother decreed: "In questa casa, si parla italiano". If they did not speak this language, she would not hear.

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"Female elements"

The requirement to speak Italian, besides having “tact”, figured in an ad published in the O Estado de S. Paulo newspaper, in which, in May 1960, an “important organization located in the center” sought “female elements, for direct collaboration with its managing director". Luisa Crema, a daughter of Italians, with perfect knowledge of the language, went to see what it was about. She went to Rua João Adolfo, to the number indicated, and was soon facing that man who did not stop talking, and said he was looking for a secretary, but not any secretary, rather, he wanted one with such and such qualities, and committed and disciplined. Both were so engrossed in the conversation, and only in Italian, that at a certain moment Civita interrupted himself and remembered to ask: "Wait. You speak Portuguese well?” She did. Luísa became his secretary for the rest of his life. It was a time, the beginning, in which the Italian language circulated through Abril like small currency. Marisa de Braud, another Italian, hired to make Manequim, remembers Civita visiting the editorial room very early to see if the staff had arrived. She would tell him, from afar: "Buon giorno, signor Victor". With the female employees, like Marisa, or the “female elements”, as the ad in the newspaper read, “Signor Victor” could reveal himself to be full of charms. He liked to distribute coquetries – “those Italian coquetries”, says Marisa, "done for fun, out of joy".

Victor Civita’s and of Editora Abril’s success story is a little, or maybe to a great extent, the success stories of Brazil in the same period. Victor Civita combined the working capacity with the fine talent of maintaining his caravel in favor of the wind, so as to use the same forces that boosted the country in general. He believed in São Paulo, and chose it to set up his ventures, at the right time. If, in the 50s, he warmed the engines with the children's magazines and photonovels, in 1960, he launched Quatro Rodas [Four Wheels] in the euphoria of the automobile industry, the joy of the crown of Juscelian developmentism. The fascicules met the cultural demand of the part of a middle class that were improving in life. The meeting in which it was decided to launch the fascicules is famous in the annals of Abril. Twelve directors were summoned to decide, first, if they should really launch them, and if yes, which to launch. Those present were unanimous in advising against the fascicules at first. Among other arguments, it was stated that the word fascicule itself was unknown to the public. Civita listened to them, thanked them for their opinion, and then added that he had forgotten to inform that in that meeting he had 51% of the votes. He was very sorry but, as owner of the 51%, he ended up deciding in favor of launching the fascicules.

He then invited them to move on to item two of the agenda – which fascicule to launch. The two strongest candidates were an encyclopedia and an edition of the Bible, created by the Italian Fabbri, called A Bíblia Mais Bela do Mundo [The Most Beautiful Bible in the World]. Civita now waived the alleged 51% of the votes. “I prefer the encyclopedia”, he said, “but you are the ones who will decide” – and he left the room.

The Bible was chosen. The encyclopedia was put aside to be launched later. The first issue of the Bible sold 150 thousand copies. The encyclopedia, launched with the Title Conhecer, beat the mark of 500 thousand copies.

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Recipe for everything

Stories like this reveal the man of boldness, the athlete of the leap in the dark. One day, he presented his son Roberto with the idea of making tourist hotels in Brazil and abroad. “And what do we know about hotels?”, Roberto had objected. He replied with another objection: “And what did Nick Hilton know before making his first hotel?" The chain of hotels was built, baptized with the name of Quatro Rodas. On another occasion, he asked Roberto if he knew how many cold stores there were in Brazil. Roberto hardly knew what cold stores were for.

"None", the older Civita concluded. “And I’m going to build them”. He did. The joy of doing exceeded that of maintaining and continuing, something he left more to the charge of his sons. When Victor Civita became aware of how Victor Civita was, which usually occurred in an already advanced phase of life, and he began to portray himself as Victor Civita, he repeated, in countless interviews and discourses, that the word he hated the most was “no”. Everything seemed possible. He was a master in reverting an argument or situation in his favor, which in principle he was against. “They would tell me that people did not read in Brazil”, he wrote once in the Latin American Daily Post. “Maybe it was true. But there was very little to read, and I told myself: ‘The potential is tremendous’”. His son Richard, in the same line, says that it was common for people, on visiting a city, and finding that there was no theater there, to conclude that there was no public for it, and would therefore be in vain to try to open one. Victor Civita, on the contrary, would see an opportunity there. This people must be yearning for a theater, he would think. Let us make one. The entrepreneurial fury was not detained in view of the unfavorable conjunctures, like the one present in the country in December 1963 - time of great uncertainties, in which the João Goulart government adopted an increasingly leftist discourse, the opposition responded with increasingly conspiratorial articulations, and in the horizon one could catch a glimpse of horrors like a possible coup d’état, a revolution, who knew, a civil war. In a meeting at the end of the year, present in Civita's home, with their respective wives, half a dozen friends, all entrepreneurs, at one time one began to say he would sell everything, another had decided to suspend his plans of expansion, another that he would leave the country… Civita informed: “Well, I have just bought a new rotary press”… “How? At this time?, one of his friends was astonished. “What is the problem”, Civita replied. “If they confiscate my company, I’m left with nothing all the same. And they, with a better company”.

He had a recipe for everything. Abril’s financial director, José Augusto Pinto Moreira, remembers a meeting with the current minister Francisco Dornelles, then secretary of the Internal Revenue, in which Civita spent the time telling Dornelles what to do. Roberto Civita remembers a meeting with Faria Lima, then mayor of São Paulo, in which Civita spent the entire time explaining how to administer the city. Once he went to the BNDE (at the time without the “S” that would more recently be added to the acronym” to ask the director, Garrido Torres, why the institution did not finance the press industry. “Because BNDE was created to promote the base industry”, replied Torres. “And the press is not base? Culture, newspapers, books, are not the basis of the development of a people”, Civita asked. “Maybe”, replied Torres, “but I must follow the statutes of the Bank, and the statutes do not indicate that the press sector is a base industry". “It is wrong”, insisted Civita. “It must change”. Ad he persisted so much that it happened that the BNDE ended up modifying its criteria.
It opened itself to the press sector, and Civita obtained financing to buy the rotary press he had in mind at the time.

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The first to arrive

The visionary, the bold, leaper in the dark and challenger of improbabilities coexisted, maybe paradoxically, with a “dangerous lover of details”, as stated by the vice-president and editorial director of Abril, Thomaz Souto Corrêa. The lover of details was son of the disciplined man who slept early and woke up early, ate little, drank no more than one cup of wine, on occasions in which he had to drink, and had a worktable that was as tidy as the elegant suits he wore. With a punctuality that irritated his partners and subordinates, he was always the first to arrive at events, and chided the others because they had not arrived on time.

He did not like the habit, common to the race of journalists, of arriving late to work, counterpart, in said race, to another habit, that of working till late. He liked to cite the regime adopted in his offices, during the first years, by J. C. Penney, the owner of the American retail chain with the same name. Penney at a quarter to 8 would position himself at the door and receive the employees one by one, saying good day. At a quarter past eight, he would close the door.

The dangerous lover of details was also revealed in the notes he sent to editors of the magazines:

To Mário de Andrade, then director of Playboy: “I’m referring to the opening page with Brunet: I think that the calendar should be more legible. If the numbers of the days are too small, it should not come out in print in four colors, but rather in black and white, on a background of small white or yellow squares".

To Fátima Ali, then director of Nova: “On pages 98, 99, 100, 1010, the capital letters that being the paragraphs are too heavy and, I would say, even ugly”.

To Thomaz Souto Corrêa: “As devotee of the good use of our language, it concerns me to have noted several times in our magazines the confusion between the words ‘mythify' (to create myths” and ‘mystify’ (to deceive, delude) (...) I count on your permanent vigilance in this and other issues for the cause of correct usage of our beautiful language".

Also to Thomaz Souto Corrêa: “All our magazines have spelling errors. Too much with regard to the names of people. (...) Another correction: the name of Joelmir Beting appears with two ‘ts’, and the correct name has only one 't', comes out every

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In the Ferris wheel

The change from the 70s to the 80s was marked by the episode, painful for Civita, of the conflict between his sons. The result was the separation of the companies, Roberto remaining with the magazines and Richard with the fascicules and books, in addition to the non-publishing part of the group, like the hotels and cold stores. For a while, Victor was shaken up with Richard, but they later went back to playing golf, once a week. The weekly golf was one of the little breaks allowed. He lived for his work and, contrary to the very often case of entrepreneurs who, themselves, do very well while the company does very badly, he kept the company always better, much better, than himself. When he died, he had the apartment he lived in, in the district of Higienópolis, with nothing that could reveal the residence of one of the foremost Brazilian entrepreneurs, and another in Guarujá. The monarch that existed in him once asked why the executives needed to win such huge sums of money. He used to say that he himself needed little, and lived with little. When traveling, he was always interviewing those he deemed could transmit something useful, investigating to the last, in the publishing field and other fields, sniffing out novelties. If he went to the theater, according to his friend Joel Ostrowicz, owner of the building at Rua do Curtume used by Abril for so many years, he wondered if it wasn’t the case of conduct the play in Brazil. One of Victor Civita's few travel stories in which business is not included is that which he narrated to the director of the Abril office in Paris, Pedro de Souza, during a visit to the French capital already at the end of his life, when he would surpass 80 years of age. “Pedro, do you know where I took Sylvana?”, he started saying. "In the Ferris wheel of the Tulherias. What wonderful view.” The worst thoughts passed crossed Pedro de Souza’s mind. What if he had felt ill? What if there had been an accident? He said: “Please, Mr. Victor, no more adventures”.

Victor Civita was not interested in politics. Like many entrepreneurs who do not distinguish between managing a business and managing a society, he considered politics a hindrance. He did not allow it. As editor, he had more to do with disseminating culture and providing entertainment that with journalism per se, believing this to be a view of the present day that leads to the political fact and researching of social and economic conflicts. Veja and, before it, Realidade, the magazines with which Abril finally established itself in the Brazilian political world, have more to do with the preferences of the son Roberto. Closer to the manner of being and operating of Victor Civita were fascicules like Gênios da Pintura [Geniuses of Painting], As Grandes Óperas e Grandes Compositores [The Great Operas and Great Composers], or book collections like Os Imortais da Literatura Universal [The Immortals of World Literature] or Teatro Vivo [Live Theater]. Not that he wanted to make money. Rather, he wanted, and a lot, if not for himself, since he was a monarch, for the company, but he coexisted with this impulse of "a sense of mission", as stated by Pedro Paulo Poppovic. He believed he was supposed to educate the people. Also because, once educated, they would buy more magazines, fascicules and books. In his last years, he became mostly focused on Fundação Victor Civita, whose object is education. In one of the many notes to his sons, which he kept in a big envelope, containing the post-mortem wishes, he stated that all the money he had, in bank accounts, stocks or personal properties, were to be reverted to the Foundation. Not one cent was to be left to his sons, who already owned the companies. “If you are unable to live from the companies you own, you do not deserve them", he decreed. Sylvana made an addendum to the same text, explaining that the order of destining the personal assets to the Foundation included her jewels.

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The first plane

Victor and Sylvana died with a one-week interval. Sylvana became ill first, and remained hospitalized weeks on end, in coma after a time. Meanwhile, Victor, despite worried and depressed with his wife's condition, carried on with his life. On Friday, the 24th of August 1990, he went to work at the Marginal building. He told his son Roberto that he felt indisposed, but nothing more. He returned home at lunchtime. The son Richard, meanwhile, was visiting Sylvana at the hospital, like he did everyday. She was already in coma, but that morning, unexpectedly, she recovered her sanity and talked. She said everything in past tense: “I was this, my life was this, you represented this and that to me…” Richard felt that she was saying goodbye. At 4:30 pm on that day, the two sons received phone calls saying that something serious had happened with Victor. On waking up from the sleep he had fallen into after lunch, he had tried to get up from bed and fallen. He was outstretched on the floor.

When they arrived, first Richard and then Roberto, Victor was dead. Richard saw to the funeral preparations while Roberto returned to Abril to oversee the cover article that Veja would publish on the subject. The watch was at the Hospital Beneficência Portuguesa, a few meters away from Hospital Osvaldo Cruz, where Sylvana was admitted. A little after midnight, Richard got away from the watch and went to visit his mother. She slept placidly. Richard sat by her side and told her: “You must know already that Victor died. Soon you will be together”. She continued sleeping placidly. "Ciao, bella mamma", Richard said. Did Sylvana really know about the death of Victor? Richard did not know, but he suspected that she did. The mother would die a week later but, for Richard, they both died at exactly the same time. “God does funny things”, said Richard, who is religious - a catholic, religion in which he had been educated since he was a child, despite the Jewish origin. “My father would have been unable to live one day without my mother".

Among the childhood memories, Victor told of the day in which his father took him to watch the landing of the first plane that arrived in Milan. Two things were recorded in the memory. One, that the people applauded. Another, that the lawn moved due to the great wind produced by the propeller. He did not know the date well, but he must have been very little to have his eyes at the level of the lawn. Already, a lot later, he traveled to Europe in the supersonic Concord, which seemed to him to conclude the parable. To him, who he had seen the first plane land in Milan, when a small child, and pilot planes from the ancient times, he had still had the opportunity to travel in the Concord. How many things he had experienced, between the Milan plane and the Concord... How many things! What a life!