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We dedicated a special page to the Lodigiani family‘s donation. This, not only because the books are several thousand, but also because Eng. Henry, with whom we have pleasantly interacted over these months, has been willing to come to our aid in many ways. He even wanted to bear the cost of sending the books he offered. Now, since the classification and cataloging of books will take some time and thus will be visible, as a list, only in months, we wanted to publish, as of now, a thank you.
It seemed to us to do everyone a favorable thing to add the testimony of the past. Adelio G. Pellegrini (pictured), a longtime friend of the Lodigiani family, who was able to find the right words to introduce them, our faculty and his library. Read further.
I was the office boy, and I had finished the III Industrial Start-up at Work. Eng. Joseph
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Lodigiani was the Managing Director of the Enterprise. Great respect and admiration from all staff, no one excluded. He was the first one in the office, 8 o’clock, the last one out, when he was in the office, 8 o’clock. Office hours were: start 9 a.m., close 7 p.m., lunch break 1-3 p.m. Every Sunday morning he was in the office. Shortly before 12 noon, the wife with her young son Michael entered the office and then left with her husband to go to mass.
Impresa Lodigiani was important nationally and in Switzerland for the work it did. Eng. Peppino created Impregilo (Impresit-Girola-Lodigiani) by signing major and important works: Kariba Dam, on the Zambezi in Rhodesia, creating the largest man-made lake in the world; Akosomo in Ghana; the relocation of the Abu Simbel temples following the construction of the Aswan Dam in Egypt; the largest Rawalpindi Dam in Pakistan, later surpassed by the Yacireta Dam built in Argentina, damming the Nile, the Indus, the Parana, the Tagus, and others. Eng. Peppino was honored by Queen Elizabeth with the title of O.B.E. Order British Empire.
When I asked in 1962 about not working on the Sabbath, in order to keep the Fourth Commandment as recorded in Holy Scripture, his response was, “Even in Ghana we have a worker who does not work on the Sabbath.”
I was a boy and was proud to be involved in a big project.
Impresa Lodigiani’s policy was: work well, keep to the schedule for the completion of the work, possibly finish it sooner. Preventing staff claims.
In 1967 I left the Lodigiani Enterprise to study theology at the Adventist Institute of Biblical Culture in Florence, now a theological faculty recognized by the Ministry of Education. Eng. Paolo Lodigiani, then president, when I went to say goodbye to him, he told me that there would always be a job for me at Lodigiani. I took him at his word: I would spend the school vacations working in the Enterprise, thus supporting myself in my studies.
In November 1970, while continuing my studies in France, I received a letter from him from Tarbela, Pakistan, in response to a postcard from me.
In the 1970s, the Youth Department had a plan to buy a property in Casentino to make it a nationwide youth center. Colleague Rizzo asked me if I could ask Eng. Lodigiani a financing, interest-free. Eng. Peppino made an appointment for me. When I went there, he was not at headquarters but had left word to join him at Impregilo where he had an important unscheduled meeting. I went there, he absented himself to talk to me, and after I presented him with the reason for my visit, he asked me if he should finance the whole project. The loan was duly repaid, but no one in the family learned of his act of liberality, as well as many others.
All the times I visited him, he always took the time, but never did he greet me by sitting on one side of the desk and me on the other: we both sat next to each other on the guest side of the desk or at the round table.
The religious books that his heirs donated to the Adventist Faculty, he did not just purchase them, signs show that they were visited by him. They are a part of his many interests. Eng: G. Lodigiani was a founder of the Giuseppe Verdi Orchestra of Milan.
Eng. Peppino Lodigiani, who was very reserved, I remember him as a great gentleman who with the important works he did honored the genius of our country.
I conclude my remembrance of Eng. Peppino with what he writes in his last pages of What I Believe , in which he summarizes the epilogue of the almost one hundred years of the Lodigiani Enterprise: “In just a few painful years, we went from the category of winners and strongmen, in which we had seemed to have behaved without arrogance, to that of losers and losers, where we seem to have managed to maintain, so far, dignity and respect (…) we feel defeated, but not humiliated, first of all because we are convinced of our substantial innocence and because our ‘decline and fall’ has not caused harm to anyone else…
I, therefore, have changed…
Who, being the very embodiment of innocence, was found guilty by all the powers, humiliated and mocked by their scoffers, abandoned by his own, and finally crucified. And this understanding of Christ’s suffering coupled with a sense of His love for man is almost the whole of faith. Perhaps, one could also say, “patior, ergo credo…”
Adelio G. Pellegrini
