Founder of Luxottica and CEO of EssilorLuxottica, leaves behind a business empire valued at more than €27 billion
His has been one of those stories of a self-made man who, starting from humble origins, manages to place himself at the top of economic power. We are talking about Leonardo Del Vecchio, founder of Luxottica and CEO of EssilorLuxottica, the largest production and distribution company in the world of optics, who died this Monday in Milan, the city where he was born 87 years ago. He was considered one of the most important businessmen in Italy and the second richest person in the country, behind Giovanni Ferrero, owner of Nutella. He leaves his six children and his wife, Nicoletta Zampillo, whom he married twice with a divorce in between, a business empire valued at 27.3 billion euros, according to the latest calculations by Forbes magazine. .
Fatherless, Del Vecchio’s mother had to leave her son in an orphanage in Milan because she worked all day and already had three other children to take care of. At the age of 14, however, the boy returned to live with his family and got a job as an errand boy in a company in the mornings, while in the afternoons he took a design and engraving course that would be very useful to him. after. In 1961, at the age of 26, he founded an eyeglass frame manufacturing workshop on land donated by a municipality in a mountainous area of Belluno, in northern Italy, for new industrial projects.
Success for Luxottica, as he called his company, began in 1971 and was consolidated over the years until it became in 1995 the world’s leading corporation in the manufacture of glasses. Its milestones include the purchase of the American brands Rayban and Oakley and the merger in 2018 with the French company Essilor, a lens giant, which gave rise to EssilorLuxottica, a group that in 2021 had a turnover of 21,500 million euros and has around 180,000 employees worldwide.
Del Vecchio claimed his humble origins and the value of effort to succeed in life. From his period in the orphanage and the time he combined work in a factory while studying, he remembered “the discipline and method” learned. “For years my food was based on boiled cabbage. Its smell reminds me of the great effort and the dreams I had of doing something of my own, even if it was small, but where I could exploit my ideas and my abilities. Today too many young people tend to give responsibility for their situation to others, thinking that the State or their parents do not help them enough. I always thought that he was privileged because of his passion and enormous desire to do things. I was sure that everything would depend on me and my work », he told him a few years ago.
The death of Del Vecchio, considered an example of a businessman with a social conscience for his charitable initiatives and the good general conditions of the Luxottica workers, was lamented by the Prime Minister, Mario Draghi. He considered him a “protagonist” of the business world and a “great Italian” who put the country “at the center of the world of innovation.” Recognized with the title of ‘Cavaliere’ of work in 1986, Del Vecchio also had significant holdings in banking, insurance and real estate companies, such as Mediobanca, Generali and Covivio.
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