Goodbye to Giordano Riello, the entrepreneur who brought air conditioning to Italy

Goodbye to Giordano Riello, the father of air conditioners. Born in 1926, he died yesterday at his home in Porto di Legnago, in the Verona area.

He had founded Aermec, the eldest daughter of the Giordano Riello International Industrial Group, which today has eight industrial realities and six commercial companies around the world.

A successful entrepreneur, one might say "old-fashioned", raised on his bread and in the workshop in one of the great families that have marked the history of Venetian and Italian industry , with that passion for research imprinted in his DNA that has allowed him to revolutionize the international air conditioning market , shaping Aermec from nothing in 1961, leader of a group that has more than 1,700 employees and revenues of over 500 million euros.

Aermec can be considered one of the leading manufacturers of air conditioners in Europe . But the engineer Giordano Riello, the last representative of a noble lineage of industrialists in the manner of Marzotto, Olivetti and Zanussi, was also a tireless blender of ideas and projects right up to the end. Faithful to the recipe handed down to him by his grandfather Ettore, who in the early twentieth century set up the first workshop in Porto di Legnago which over time became the stronghold of burners.

"It helped me a lot to be born into a family of entrepreneurs, where work was a constant even at the table, just as I was lucky to have had good teachers," he said.

He was, Defense Minister Guido Crosetto said, «one of the greats of Italian industry, the man who made the history of air conditioning in the world, one of the last great entrepreneurs who made the economic miracle possible after the war and Italian manufacturing». "An innovator" - recalled the governor of Veneto Luca Zaia - with a company in which "social commitment has gone hand in hand with economic growth".

The mayor of Bevilacqua, Valentino Girlanda, also recalled this: «He had created a development and a culture of work throughout our territory».

(Unioneonline/D)