Do You Know the Village of Cadempino?

You probably don’t, I don’t. And I’ve driven through it several times. But this is the third richest community of Switzerland. With its 1350 inhabitants that is a major feat. Obviously, there must be a big tax payer around. 

I have been looking all over the net for a general view of the village but couldn’t find one. Not even the official communal page shows one. There is an easy explanation for this; the village is dead ugly. It is cut first by the motorway coming from the Alps leading to Milan and on a parallel to it by the railway going the same direction. In addition, there are two rivers crossing road and railway. Not much of a place to make a holiday in.

But the village was first mentioned in 844 and changed hands several times between the local abbey, the bishop of Milan, and the Dukes of Milan, until it was settled as part of the Swiss Confederation in 1807 and became part of Switzerland in 1848. That accounts for it having at least a pretty church.

This modern building is the cause for its riches. If you find it, you still won’t know who is hiding there, because there are no signs and no names anywhere to be found. The building cost $50 million to build, and it took less than two years for the company residing in it to pay it out of tax savings. I would call that a good investment. The calculation is mine, and I didn’t calculate the further savings in the pay checks, because social security cost is much lower in Switzerland than in Italy.

This car somewhere in Arabia shows the typical monogram of this mysterious tax payer. It is Gucci who has its world head quarters in Switzerland. If you believed they were in Florence, you were wrong. So was I, until I found out about it tonight. So remember to buy as much Gucci as you can, you make a very small Swiss community a lot richer by that.

Gucci is quite proficient at playing the elusive company, I found while doing this research. Whereas the label is known anywhere in the world and quite happily linked up with Florence, there are almost no offices situated there. And I found a blogger looking for the headquarters of Gucci in Germany. He failed, by the way, because there aren’t any offices in Germany. In truth, there are almost no offices of Gucci anywhere outside Switzerland because all correspondence is handled by local agents. 

Further reading
The Village of St Silvester
And God Granted Their Wishes
Bern: Seat of The Federal Government