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Reds & Taxes. Such versatility and drive has enabled North Italy's businessmen to resist, and sometimes overcome, the Italian government's forage into political and economic fantasy. Saddled with a near-medieval tax system that makes an honest declaration of income an invitation to bankruptcy, and perennially endangered by the temptation of Italy's ruling Christian Democratic Party to make a deal with the powerful Nenni Socialist Party at the expense of free enterprise. Italian businessmen live under a constant state of siege. In the postwar years they fought the threats of Communist unions to take over their companies by handing out paternalistic fringe benefits with a lavishness no U.S. firm would dream of. (After touring the sports grounds, libraries, kindergartens, social center and free medical facilities that Olivetti provides at its Ivrea headquarters, an English visitor dryly remarked: "I assume that the fact that you also produce office machines is pure coincidence.") The results have been mixed: North Italian workers no longer support Communist political strikes, but they go right on electing Communist union leaders as the best economic goads to management.
Even without Communist unions, the North Italian executive must operate in a wondrously mixed economy where there is already more government ownership of industry than in any other country outside the Communist bloc. Born under Mussolini's Fascism during the Depression, the government-run Institute for Industrial Reconstruction (I.R.I.) owns 30% of all outstanding stock in Italy, controls 350 companies ranging from the nation's largest banks to the Alitalia air service. The busy port of Genoa, whose shipments have tripled to 44 million tons since 1953, is dominated by I.R.I.'s Ansaldo shipyards, which built the I.R.I.-operated luxury liners Cristoforo Colombo and Leonardo da Vinci.
The Head Buccaneer. Biggest anomaly of North Italy's boom is that its closest approximation to the buccaneering giants of 19th century capitalism is Enrico Mattel, 55, head of E.N.I., the state-owned oil and gas monopoly. When Enrico Mattei, a handsome, hawk-faced fellow, discovered the Po Valley's methane deposits 15 years ago, he became one of the key wonder workers of the Italian miracle. Since then, using state funds to emulate his private enterprise rivals, he has built a diversified industrial fief that includes everything from motels to Italy's largest fertilizer factory. He also boasts one of Italy's paternalistic company towns—Metanopoli.
Mattei delights Italy's nationalists with his swashbuckling sorties into the international oil market. Ordinary Italians love to see him outrage the major oil companies by flooding their European markets with his AGIP gas (much of which is made from Russian crude) and outbidding them for drilling rights in oil-rich African and Middle Eastern nations. But Italian businessmen, though appreciative of E.N.I.'s methane, argue that Mattei has kept its price higher than need be to finance his international ventures and his political and economic battles.