(3 of 5)
Second in power only to Valletta in Italian private industry is coldly handsome Count Carlo Faina, chairman of the giant Montecatini chemical complex. Despite an aristocratic heritage—he holds a longstanding title granted by Pope Pius IX and confirmed by the Italian royal family—Faina joined Montecatini 35 years ago as one of 360 applicants answering a want ad. Assigned to rebuild the chemical complex after the war, he defied stockholder opposition by multiplying the outstanding shares in order to obtain new capital. Now, with sales of $600 million a year, Montecatini slugs it out internationally with the likes of Du Pont and Britain's Imperial Chemical Industries, and in the Italian market has a reputation for slashing prices until a rival is forced to give up the fight.
No less deadly a competitor is massive, baldheaded Franco Marinotti, 70, boss of Snia Viscosa, Italy's biggest producer of synthetic textile fibers. Marinotti, who preaches a cold-blooded business philosophy ("Gratitude is a sentiment possessed mainly by dogs"), did his postwar rebuilding without a cent of U.S. aid. Despite this self-imposed handicap, he pushed Snia into the front rank of industry by automating to cut costs and by instituting a research program so successful in turning up new fibers that, as he boasts, even the U.S.'s Allied Chemical Corp. has signed up to produce Snia's caprolactam, raw material for nylon. As head of one of the world's largest exporting companies, Marinotti brushes aside talk of Common Market challenges. Says he with a grin: "I've always been in the Common Market."
The Da Vinci Complex. Like Marinotti—who paints passable landscapes under the name "Francesco Torri"—many a North Italian businessman takes as his personal hero that versatile Renaissance genius, Leonardo da Vinci, and like Da Vinci is not deterred from any enterprise by lack of experience. A prime example is Count Gaetano Marzotto, 67, whose family-owned Marzotto Textile is Italy's biggest wool spinner and producer of readymade clothes. Several years ago, enraged by an all-night bout with bedbugs in a Sicilian hotel, Marzotto set out to build his own hotels in Italy's remote places. Clean, simple and inexpensive, the improbably named "Jolly Hotels" were such a success that the Marzottos now have 51 of them, the biggest privately owned hotel chain in Italy.
Ferdinando Innocenti, 71, is another who combines restless curiosity with shrewd economic sense. One day before World War II, Innocenti, then a small-time maker of steel pipe in Milan, bumped his head on a wooden scaffolding. This, in Da Vinci style, led him to develop the lightweight steel scaffolds now standard the world over. After the war, he bent his tubes into a motor scooter frame and, with his Lambretta, rode the crest of Italy's pent-up demand for cheap transportation. Next, spotting Italian industry's growing need for tools, he began producing heavy machinery and giant electric steelmaking furnaces. Recently, to keep up with the middle-class Italian's desire to graduate from two-wheeled transportation to four. Ferdinando, with his son, Luigi, took Innocenti Co. into assembling British Motor Corporation's Italian-styled Austin A-4O.