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At the end of World War II, most of North Italy's industry lay in ruins, and even to regain the modest prosperity of prewar years seemed a task of decades. The resurgence came much quicker, and for three reasons:
∙ U.S. Marshall Plan aid of $3.5 billion to Italy—a substantial part of which went to rebuild the North, where there was much more industry that was worth rebuilding.
∙ The tough fiscal policy of the late President Luigi Einaudi, which prevented runaway inflation.
∙ Discovery of methane in the Po Valley, which has given Italian industry a cheap domestic fuel source to stoke its industrial boom.
The Autocrats. These strokes of good fortune were converted into "the Italian miracle" by the energy and imagination of North Italian businessmen and the industry of their employees. Unlike the committee-minded U.S. businessman, the Italian chief executive is a freewheeling autocrat who bases his decision far more on intuition than on the promptings of scientific management.
Probably no Italian industrialist shouldered his way to U.S. attention with more of a jolt than the late Adriano Olivetti. An intense idealist with a left-trending political philosophy. Olivetti was looked askance at by many other Italian businessmen who argued that what really kept the Olivetti Co. going was the sober, steadying hand of Financial Wizard Giuseppe Pero, 68, now the company's chief executive. Yet, for all his quirks, Olivetti was a marketing genius, who by introducing the sophisticated "Italian look" in office machines, built a family business into an international concern and just before his death 22 months ago startled the business world by acquiring Connecticut's faltering Underwood Corp. in the first major takeover of a U.S. firm by foreigners since World War II.
Courtly Killers. In Italy, Olivetti's influence never approached that of tiny (5 ft. 1 in.) Vittorio Valletta, 78, managing director of the Fiat automobile empire, which now builds 80% of the 600,000 cars produced in Italy each year and is a major producer of steel, locomotives, marine diesel engines and aircraft. A courtly ex-accountant who rebuilt Fiat from World War II rubble. Valletta led the company to its present near monopoly in Italy partly by taking advantage of a prohibitive tariff on foreign cars. Now that the Common Market is about to change all that, Valletta has moved to keep his hold on the home market with long overdue price cuts, simultaneously has launched an expansion program designed to double Fiat's production and flood Europe with Fiat's smallest cars, the two-cylinder 500 and four-cylinder 600, which undercut Volkswagen in both size and price.