Santa Margherita

Eighty years of “actual” history, but more than two centuries of business activity in the Veneto: Santa Margherita was founded in 1935 by Count Gaetano Marzotto Jr. who, at the time, was running the family’s Vicenza-based textile group, which was started up at the beginning of the 19th century by his grandfather, Luigi. His aim was a very specific one: to succeed in creating an innovative agricultural hub that would break the traditional mould of the time and represent a source of modernity and growth. This vision was perfectly in line with the spirit of Count Gaetano Jr.: a real tycoon who was extremely able in reconciling company objectives with social needs. Indeed, around the Santa Margherita estate – just as at Valdagno around the Marzotto headquarters – he created the first residential quarters for his employees, as well as cultural and recreational facilities. This sensitivity was real and not merely a façade, and he persisted with it through the difficult times of the Second World War and the immediate postwar years. He was an entrepreneurial figure who played a prominent role in Italian financial matters: he had an uncommon knack for interpreting the trends of the world economy (it was also he who came up with the idea of hotel chains, thus giving a helping hand to Italy’s burgeoning tourist industry). He made important decisions that affected the public good, but he also encouraged more widespread development, earning the nickname of “the humanist businessman”. Count Gaetano Jr. had eight children and today his grandson (who bears his name and is the son of his eldest son, Vittorio Emanuele) is in charge of Santa Margherit.For his “revolutionary” estate, Gaetano Marzotto Jr. chose a vast property of over a thousand hectares lying between Fossalta and Portogruaro: a tract of land that the Stucky family had put up for sale, after having completely reclaimed it and made it suitable for agriculture. Where before there had been marshland, one could now admire well-ordered fields. Gaetano Marzotto carried out further improvements on the property: he completely modified the cultivation techniques, unified the estate and abolished sharecropping, introducing new crops and improving the living conditions of the farm workers. These were, for the time, epoch-making changes, and other companies would follow his example in the decades that were to follow.