The origins of the Eredi Rocca Genesio firm go back a century, when in long ago 1902 Angelo Rocca founded the first balloon factory in Italy. Born in the town of Casalvieri in 1884, he was only four years old when he emigrated with his mother and sister to France, to reach and help his brother in law who, from itinerant vendor of balloons, had himself become a balloon maker.
Even if at the start Angelo, called Angeliglio (little Angelo), wasn't much help, considering his tender years, he was truly predestined to become the "balloons patriarch". Orphaned of his father when he was sixteen months old, he quickly learned that in order to live you had to work. Therefore, he too began by selling balloons on the sidewalks of Marseilles, but he very soon began to be personally concerned with production.
In 1899 he was only fifteen years old when he decided to stay behind in France while the others came back to Italy, and for two years, he by himself, and successfully, brought the little factory ahead. He supplied the best shops of Marseilles up until he decided to sell out to go back to Casalvieri and set up a factory there; it was the first in all of Italy.
Thus it was that Angelo Rocca began to set flying in Italian skies the first balloons made among the vineyards of his Ciociaria. But his colored balloons were not wanted only in Italy: they were in great demand throughout all of Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
In those times the balloon was made entirely by hand, and the raw material used to make it was the so-called "sawn rubber leaf" that made the procedure for its working long and complicated. Angelo Rocca, always looking to improve his production methods and product characteristics, then sought something mechanical in order to no longer have to go on producing balloons by hitting them with a hammer. He ruined more than one Necchi machine until one day he succeeded in making up a device that hammered instead of sewing. With it he greatly speeded up production and manufactured, as no one before him had done, balloons a meter and a half in circumference.
In 1950 the raw material became latex and definitively replaced the sawn rubber leaf. Latex changed the entire job and made it possible to free the imagination in the production of shaped balloons, which, from that time on, began to take on the most varied forms.
Amid the thousand vicissitudes of his life Angelo Rocca never ceased to love his trade and to perfect its production techniques, and, despite the competition that arose in Casalvieri and in other Italian towns, the name Rocca always kept its value for the export trade.
In 1972 the Casalvieri plants for the production of balloons became automated and the merit was due to Genesio Rocca, one of Angelo's many children. But despite the great help of high technology, still today balloon production conceals many secrets that make it possible to perform this trade efficiently and well. The heirs of Genesio Rocca still continue, then, to jealously keep their precious secrets, handed down from father to son since the time of the founder of the family, secrets that still today make it possible for Eredi Rocca Genesio to be a leading firm throughout the world in the manufacture of balloons. The Eredi Rocca Genesio firm is currently managed and administered by Aldo Rocca.
