In the years of the economic boom, tourism became mass. In the summer months the highways begin to fill with Italians looking for a place in the sun. However, it is not just about individual journeys, in those years part the revolution of organized tourism and the architect of that change is the Turin native Franco Rosso. Born in 1928, Rosso was displaced during the war in Govone (Cuneo) where he met his future wife Amalia Saracco, daughter of the managers of the couriers that cross the Langhe. They are the buses that take students to school and people to work. Franco’s father is an army officer and his grandfather is the owner of two hotels: one in Turin and one in Genoa. Travel is in the family DNA. Franco would have liked to be an admiral to sail the seas and explore half the world but, once the war was over, he decided to enroll, without much conviction, in Economics and Commerce.
Turin in those years was trying to recover from the war, in 1952 there were only six travel agencies in the city and they dealt exclusively with ticketing, including boarding for those emigrating to the Americas. At the beginning of the 1950s, his wife Amalia’s family’s coaches were rented to an agency in Turin that organized mountain trips for skiers every Sunday. Amalia asks Franco to take care of organizing those excursions directly, opening his own travel agency. But to do this you needed to have a minimum of experience in the sector. Franco thus leaves university and begins his unpaid internship at the Perlo Viaggi agency. Once that experience was over, it opened on April 1, 1953 the «Franco Rosso travel and tourism agency», a tiny place in Corso Giulio Cesare15.
Franco introduces himself as a travel agent, but that is a profession almost unknown to most people. He began by organizing trips to Piedmont: the Sacra di San Michele, Sant’Antonio di Ranverso, the Vezzolano Abbey and the “Turin by night” visits. The first great success, however, was the trip to Turin Caselle airport. The evening excursion left by bus from Turin Porta Nuova station. The group was awaited by the airport director who led people onto a terrace in front of the landing strip. Suddenly the runway lights came on and shortly afterwards, to the excitement of those present, the flight from Rome landed, often carrying well-known people. In those years, foreign tourism in Italy was almost non-existent, unlike other European countries where it was emerging. Franco Rosso understood that this would be the future, printed the first travel catalogs and started the first coach trips in Europe which included week-long packages such as the «Lakes and glaciers of Switzerland» or «The castles of the Loire plus Paris».
They were trips intended for a selected audience, with a good spending capacity, and people came to Turin from all over Italy to take part in these excursions. With the increase in turnover «Francorosso» moved to the city center and opened the agency in Via Roma on the corner of Piazza Cln. Franco’s desire is to launch long-range destinations, his goal is travel to Africa. The passion for Africa had been transmitted to him by the stories of his father who had been a soldier in Eritrea. The idea came to fruition at the beginning of the Seventies thanks to an invitation from the Boac airline which took the Rosso couple from Turin to Nairobi in Kenya. During that trip the two understand that new frontiers can be opened for tourism. First in Italy, «Francorosso» begins to sell organized trips with charter flights first to Africa and then also to the East. The success is immediate. It is still a niche tourism, in those years show business personalities, crowned heads, entrepreneurs and established freelancers leave. It is only from the end of the 1980s that organized tourism becomes accessible to a wider public. They are adventurous journeys, itineraries of discovery of worlds and territories that are largely still unexplored.
His daughter Sara remembers: «The catalogs of the Seventies and Eighties told the geography and history, they were almost books with few photos, and a lot of writing. Today in travel catalogs there are only photos and three lines of writing.” The covers were designed by the painter Pietro Gallina. The tour operator even decides to print a comic featuring two travelers traveling around the world. His son Paolo remembers: «In the agency in Via Roma my father had set up a cinema where documentaries were screened, guests were invited and tea was offered. You entered that world and dreamed.” The moment of maximum expansion came at the end of the nineties when «Francorosso» merges with «Alpitour».
The pioneer of organized travel passed away last year in Lugano at the age of 94, faithful to his motto to the end: the world is to be enjoyed.
