Anselmo

Carlo Anselmo was born in 1847, son of a well-off peasant family. His dad, Cesare, moved to Turin, worked hard and opened a string of taverns in the city centre. In 1884, in a small workshop in via Mazzini, young Carlo Anselmo took the family business to a new direction. Working day and night, he obtained the best mix of herbs and aromatic spices to infuse in the best Moscato wine from Canelli (Asti, Italy).

He called this product Vermouth Anselmo. The bottles began to be seen more and more often in the elegant and exclusive cafeterias located downtown. Towards the beginning of the XX century, Carola Alba, Carlo Anselmo’s daughter, led the company growth, exporting thousands of bottles of vermouth worldwide. Carola Alba, with her husband Carlo Montiferrari, moves the plant to None, a small village just outside Turin.
Here they created two new specialties for foreign markets: Vermouth Dante and Aperitivo Pinocchio.

Prohibition, however, slowed down the company sales in the United States. C. Anselmo & C., now managed by Aldo Bachi, suffered from a strong downsizing. With the outbreak of the Second World War a real tragedy occurred: Aldo Bachi, like many other Turinese Jews, was deported by the Nazis and never returned back home. During the post-war period, the economy of the country finally succeeded to get back to its former status, but as for all the ’50s, Anselmo’s production did not start again. Vermouth started to be produced again only in the ’60s, under the guidance of a new family of Turinese businessmen.