The history of the Fracassetti butcher shop is long and spans generations. Together with the Urban District of Commerce, we met Marco, the current owner of the business, to learn more about its story.
Luigi Fracassetti from Mornico al Serio traded eggs and chickens when he met his Adele in Bergamo – in via Guglielmo d’Alzano – who had a fruit and vegetable shop.
He fell in love with her, but to get her as a wife he had to fulfill a very clear request: ‘Either get me a shop or I’m not marrying you!’.
So, in 1952, for 280 thousand lire, he bought a small shop in the heart of the Upper Town and made it a poultry-butcher shop. Shortly thereafter, seven more opened in the neighbourhood. Of these, today, only the Marcelleria di Marco Fracassetti remains, one of Luigi and Adele’s four children.
The couple wanted all their children to study and insisted that they all graduate. Their father believed in the value of work and culture and both wanted their children to be free to choose their own path. They studied medicine, economics and commerce, mathematics and languages.
Then Marco decided to continue his parents’ business. Since childhood, like his siblings, every evening at nine he went down to the shop to work. They plucked chickens, cut meat and everyone knew how to do everything. But work always came after study.
As often happens, the generational shift was not easy and there was a moment when he had to make it clear that from then on he would go on alone: ‘I said to mum: either you or me!’.
Marco could count on his wife Nadia, who had decided to leave her beloved profession to follow him – after many years she still proudly says: ‘I am a professional nurse.’
Nadia is kind and shy, she has been with Marco for thirty years, together day and night. ‘I don’t know if it was a good thing or a bad thing, but today we understand each other with a look,’ she says softly.
He is a true merchant, who welcomes those who come in to buy cheese and greets them after selling them a tenderloin, and she says without embarrassment, ‘I really am hopeless… I would give the meat away!’
Marco is exuberant and generous, a modern adult Garrone from the book “Heart’ who, like him, loves to take care of the most fragile and always has a smile and a kind word to share.
It takes just half an hour in his shop to realise how much the place is a bit like home to the residents of the Upper Town. Someone passes to leave a bunch of keys, sign up to the parish crèche, to bring a score or posters for the next concert in the square. They know that Marco is available and welcoming and, while his hands continue to work, he does not forget to ask how Mrs. Maria’s back pain is going or to congratulate a young woman for the ‘little one’ she holds in her arms.
If for a moment he leaves the shop, he continues greeting people and stopping for a few jokes or briefly to reflect on the Upper Town, tourists and residents: “Four hundred and fifty Swiss have passed by between yesterday and today and I’m happy, our city is beautiful and needs to be seen!’
It also happens that, between the cutting of one piece of one cheese or another, someone enters humming ‘Nessun dorma’ and Marco joins them quickly with a loud voice without hesitating.
Singing is his passion. He started in the Santa Maria Maggiore choir with Don Pedemonti and today is part of four choirs, including a gospel group. But – he underlines – for some months he has a new love: ‘I started playing the saxophone!’.
Macelleria Fracassetti, with its beautiful shop windows full of local zero-kilometre products, is still a local shop with a real social protection function, care of neighbourhood relationships and which courageously challenges big changes and the growing presence of large retailers, shopping centres and online shopping.
Marco considers himself lucky because he was able to honour a motto in which he strongly: ‘Do good while you are young.’ But he adds: ‘In our day, it was easier to put hay in the farmhouse.’