Canneto sull'Oglio

In 1898 the street lighting of Canneto sull'Oglio came on thanks to an old mill converted into a power station, designed and pushed through by Hermann Einstein, Albert's father, who in those years was seeking his fortune with electrical installations across northern Italy. The venture did not save him from bankruptcy, and the family left the town; the mill, however, stayed, and it began producing current again on the twenty-fifth of September 2021, when the Garda Chiese land reclamation consortium installed there a small hydroelectric plant that exploits the drop in the water before it empties into the Oglio. A hundred and twenty-three years later, the same fall of water is doing the same job.

The town, four thousand five hundred and eleven inhabitants in the province of Mantua, was called simply Canneto until 1862, from the Latin cannetum, a bed of marsh reeds. For much of the twentieth century it was the Italian capital of the doll: Furga, born as a ceramics factory, switched to toys and became a brand known abroad, until it was taken over and shut down in 2005. In its place grew the Canneto nursery district, two thousand five hundred hectares of broadleaf plants with an annual turnover of around one hundred and fifty million euros. The Giulio Superti Furga toy collection, displayed in the civic museum, preserves what is left of the doll town.