Italo Svevo was not only a famous writer, but also a business executive. Part of the success of Veneziani antifoulings is due to him

by Niccolò Volpati

Let's start from the end. The First World War is over and Italo Svevo can devote himself fully to his most successful novel: "Zeno's conscience". To do so, he can finally limit his commitment as a company manager.

What did he do? Antifouling paints. The famous underwater painting Moravia, produced and sold by Veneziani of Trieste, owes much of its commercial success to Italo Svevo. It is above all thanks to him, in fact, that Veneziani's antifouling was also produced in London, as well as in Trieste and Murano, and supplied the British Royal Navy, but not only.

Even the hull of Shamrock V, the J Class with which Sir Thomas Lipton, the tea man, tried, in 1930, to win the America's Cup, then known as the Cup of the Hundred Guineas, used Veneziani antifouling. And Sir Lipton was also a customer won over by Italo Svevo.

But let's take it one step at a time. This story begins more or less in the second half of the 1800s in Trieste. Giuseppe Moravia produced grease for wagons, but it was a poor commodity, with little profit. Her children, Olga and Guido, were therefore forced to seek their fortune in Marseilles.

In France, Olga married a grocer: Gioachino Veneziani. When her father died in 1885, Olga returned to Trieste. As an inheritance, Giuseppe Moravia left mainly debts, but there was also a mysterious clause in the will.

In the text, in fact, a secret formula was mentioned concerning the "painting of the hulls of the canals" and in Giuseppe Moravia's last will it was provided that this secret would be handed down to his wife Francesca, better known as Fanny.

Fanny was an energetic woman and not at all resigned. He decided to set up a factory near his home to better supervise the workers and to make his children work. He bought a former tableware factory, already with the ovens suitable for producing the very secret paint for the hulls of the canals.

The very first antifouling paint was produced by John Hay, an Englishman. Inside was vegetable tar, rectified mineral oil, copper peroxide and other substances.

In England, many inventors indulged themselves in search of the magic formula to prevent the formation of algae and dog teeth on hulls.

But no one was able to develop a really effective product. When Fanny inherited her husband Joseph's secret formula in 1885, she was no longer so young. He therefore decided to entrust the production to his son-in-law Gioachino Veneziani. The problem was that she continued to keep the secret.

Neither Gioachino, nor his wife Olga, nor the workers who worked in the factory, really knew what was inside the mysterious underwater painting. Gioachino Veneziani was a grocer in Marseille where the famous Marseille soap was produced.

He managed to modify his father-in-law's secret formula by adding caustic soda and vegetable resin. He thus obtained the same advantage that Marseille soap offered. When hot, in fact, the paint spread perfectly on the hull, but once cooled it hardened and adhered perfectly to the hull.

The paint also had the advantage of "washing" the hull because in contact with seawater it melted slowly and progressively. In 1887, just two years after he started the business, the Moravia varnish produced by Gioachino Veneziani was a huge success.

All Lloyd ships passing through the port of Trieste were treated with this new antifouling. Production grew rapidly and the Trieste factory was joined by another one in Murano, near Venice. The real production manager was Olga, Gioachino's wife.

Like her mother, Fanny was quick and resolute. He preferred to hire workers who were not particularly smart because those who were too intelligent could steal the secret of the formula of the antifouling paint. To communicate between the Trieste and Murano factories, he used a real coded language to avoid industrial espionage.

Olga herself measured the exact and very secret temperature of the boilers to produce the paint and, above all, she was breathing down the necks of the workers to prevent production from slowing down. Within a few years, Gioachino moved to the countryside and left his wife to take care of everything.

But what does Italo Svevo have to do with this story? Olga Moravia and Gioachino Veneziani had four children and one of these, Livia, married Ettore Schmitz, or Italo Svevo.

Ettore Schmitz was born in Trieste in 1861. At the age of fourteen he was sent, together with his brothers, to study German in Bavaria. Then he returned to Trieste and for nineteen years he was employed in a bank.

A job that did not satisfy him. He began to write novels and in 1892, under the pseudonym of Italo Svevo, he published "Una vita" which was followed, six years later, by "Senilità". Both of these novels remained almost completely unknown. Neither the public nor the critics appreciated them.

In 1896 he married Livia Veneziani and in 1899, after resigning from his job in the bank, he was hired in the company of his father-in-law Gioachino Veneziani. The activity of novelist had been almost completely set aside after the two failures. Olga, however, did not fully trust him. He was a guy with too many crickets in his head. Passionate about literature, a frequent visitor to libraries and even wanted to be a writer!

But at the beginning of the 20th century the opportunity arose to put this bizarre son-in-law to work. It is said that in Malta an English admiral noticed an Austrian ship entering the port for dry docking.

He was amazed at the cleanliness of the hull and inquired he learned that the previous painting had been done more than six months earlier. How was this possible? What miraculous underwater painting did he have? The Moravia paint, of course, produced by the Veneziani company of Trieste.

Italo Svevo with his wife Livia Veneziani

And so the Royal Navy decided to stock up on that exceptional product. Olga sent Ettore Schmitz to London and, as she told the writer Umberto Saba, he was very tense about that negotiation with the most powerful Navy in the world.

When he met the British Admiralty, he was ushered into a bare room, shortly after a plainclothes officer arrived and asked him a few simple questions and reassured him that the file was already known: the deal was done! Svevo then dedicated himself to production and in 1903 in Charlton, a suburb of London near Greenwich and the Arsenale, he opened the English headquarters of the Veneziani company.

The whole procedure was followed by Italo Svevo: choice of the place, purchase of the structure, hiring of workers. Italo Svevo was by now a famous businessman and traveled continuously moving from Trieste and Murano to London.

He needed to improve his English and for this reason he turned to a private teacher who lived in Trieste. This was none other than the writer James Joyce with whom he formed a strong bond of friendship.

At the outbreak of the First World War, Gioachino Veneziani, who was an Italian citizen and moreover suspected of irredentism, took refuge, together with his wife Olga, first in Italy, then in Zurich and London.

The war regulations required that each factory be headed by an Austrian citizen. And so Ettore Schmitz, who had an Austrian passport, became the sole owner of the Veneziani company.

On December 10, 1917, two Italian MAS sank the battleship Wien at anchor in the port of Muggia, right in front of the Veneziani house and company. Ettore Schmitz and Livia Veneziani, in contravention of the provisions on blackouts, turned on the lights, thus allowing the escaped sailors to reach the villa where they were also refreshed.

By the end of the war, Trieste had become Italian territory and Olga Moravia was able to resume her place in the management of the family factory. Ettore Schmitz returned to being Italo Svevo and, encouraged by his former English teacher James Joyce, he was able to devote himself to writing his most successful novel: "Zeno's Conscience".