Next to Gina Lollobrigida, Italy's greatest pneumatic export is the Pirelli automobile tire. In Italy the huge Pirelli rubber company is as well known as pasta and Puccini: bambini suck Pirelli nipples, their parents slumber on Pirelli foam rubber mattresses, millions stride about daily on Pirelli-made rubber soles and heels. Pirelli is Italy's sole maker of tennis balls and linoleum, its biggest producer of raincoats, rubber sponges, battery cases, overshoes and ice bags. Every year Pirelli turns out enough high-tension wire to stretch to the moon and back, and its coaxial cable piped the wedding of Grace Kelly to TV stations all over Europe.
As Italy's third largest business—and one of its biggest dollar earners—Pirelli turns out 55% of all the nation's rubber products. With 16 foreign plants scattered from Belgium to Brazil, the company peddles its broadly diversified line in 112 nations and principalities, employs a worldwide staff of 50,000 people.
But Pirelli's achievements are not only commercial. President Alberto Pirelli, 74, has passed on so many benefits of free enterprise to his workers, in the form of high wages and fringe and other benefits, that he has furnished Italian businessmen with one of the best examples of how to fight the Communist unions that dominated Italian labor in the postwar years. Last week, when the votes were tallied for this year's elections in Pirelli's plants, anti-Communist unions handed the Reds a solid shellacking. At Pirelli's big Turin plant workers voted 54% in favor of anti-Communist unions, tumbled the Red vote from 69% to 46% in a year. The Communist vote in all Pirelli plants fell below 50% for the first time since World War II; anti-Communist unions won a clear majority with 64 of 113 seats on plant councils, thus democratic unions became the major bargaining agents with the company.
Cables for La Scala. Italy's greatest international enterprise began in the ferment of Italian nationalism in 1870, when a patriotic young engineer, Giovanni Battista Pirelli, learned that the proud new nation of Italy was forced to import rubber hose from its recent enemy France. Two years later Pirelli, then 27, opened a rubber plant in Italy with $42,000 of borrowed capital, 35 workers and a smattering of experience in the art of vulcanizing rubber. For Italy's new army Pirelli produced some of the earliest military telegraph wires; for Milan's Edison Central Electric Co. he branched out into rubber-coated power lines. His first customer: Milan's famed La Scala Opera House, which has been lighted ever since by Pirelli cables. Rubbermaker Pirelli kept branching out, into bustles, bicycle tires, carefully trained his son Alberto to take over the family business.