Origin of the brand
Marcello Vitorino was born in 1903 in Treviso, Italy, his father was the owner of a small piece of land and had some money, although not much.
In 1913, Marcello’s father was struggling to keep the family income and was afraid of the possibility of a war that could hit Italy, also taking into account that for decades people were leaving the country emigrating to other european countries and even the american continent in search of a better life because Italy’s economy wasn’t going well, he didn’t see other way out and decided to sell his land and move to Brazil with his family.
In Brazil they went for a colony of italians at the south of the country, bought a small land and started they life again.
During World War 2, Macello was in his 40s, unlike his father he was working at the city, running a shop that fixed tractors, trucks and some cars, what he learned to do working at the colony farms. But with the war, factories around the world stopped building tractors, trucks and cars to build weapons, airplanes and tanks. This lead to a gap in parts for maintenance and people started to need them, so who once fixed them, now was manufacturing parts for them. Marcello was one of those and build a factory of parts, mostly engine parts, under the name Indústrias Vitorino (Vitorino Industries).
With the end of WW2, the world was trying to go back to the normal everyday life and factories were back to produce vehicles but they found a fierce competition with national factories that had economic protection from the government, it gave Marcello the chance to start to build entire cars, so in 1955 the first model came out of the factory, the Patrono.
