(5 of 5)
The Revolutionaries. But even where the government is strongest, North Italy's private industry manages to flourish. Though the state produces 55% of Italy's steel, Milan's Falck Steel succeeds by specializing in high-grade alloys. Periodic talk of nationalization of the electric power industry fails to faze ramrod-backed Giorgio Valeric, 57, managing director of Italy's largest utility, the Edison Group. Snaps Valerio: "We've doubled output in ten years, and we're still going ahead. Politicians are conservatives. We industrialists, we are the revolutionaries."
Most Italian businessmen seem to share Valerie's disdain for "those bureaucrats in Rome." After Olivetti's Underwood takeover, one industrialist exulted: "Americans used to come here as if they were visiting Black Africa, but they've learned a thing or two." To a man. North Italian businessmen dislike the "Italian miracle" phrase that the Italian press began to use some years ago. Says Leopoldo Pirelli, 36, third generation of his family to run the huge (1961 sales: $220 million) Pirelli rubber company: "There's more perspiration than is normally involved in a miracle." The secret lies far closer to hand, in industrial imagination, high skills, hard work, aggressive ambition. Perhaps the finest result of the North Italy boom is the fact that, after the long years of Fascism and the humiliation of military defeat. Italy's national self-respect has been restored and is increasing by the works of its own people.