Abstract

Succession in family businesses is a crucial process, on which the very continuity of the firm depends beyond the lifetime, or the operational capacity, of the entrepreneur. Generational change is not only a form of asset transfer but can profoundly change the structure, strategies, and management styles of the firm. This paper analyses the difficult successions that took place at Banco Torlonia in the mid-nineteenth century. A forced succession (1829) and a missed «passing of the baton» (1863) delimited the venture of one of the major Italian private banks of the nineteenth century, whose business was linked to various stages of the Risorgimento process. The events at Banco Torlonia explored in this paper highlight the significant intertwining of symbolic, relational, and gender elements with more strictly entrepreneurial ones, crucial for understanding the family business