Cover Story
Nowhere does the plant, man, grow more vigorously than in Italy.
—Stendhal, 1826
IN the land of Michelangelo, Garibaldi and the Medicis there reigns a vast and unusual variety of contemporary heroes. The Italians idolize Grand Prix drivers, artists, novelists and occasionally Sicilian banditti. They fall barely short of adoring Nino Benvenuti, the boxing champion. They lavish attention on their celebrated movie directors—Antonioni, Fellini, Rossellini. And who, of course, could overlook Gina or Sophia?
To this colorful collection the Italians have lately added a less likely hero: the industrialist. He has earned national popularity because he and his kind are transforming Italy. The industrialists have produced an economic expansion that Italians call Il Miracolo or, simply, Il Boom, which has laced the countryside with crowded autostrade and studded the cities and villages with TV antennas. More fundamentally, Il Boom is converting Italy from a peasant society that served an elite into a consumer society that caters to the mass of the country's 54 million people.
The most widely admired and envied Italian industrialist—the Numero Uno—is Giovanni Agnelli, the head of automaking Fiat. Turin-based Fiat, which has produced four out of every five cars on Italy's roads, has done more than any other Italian firm to shape the country's new affluence at home and influence abroad. "Agnelli has a mythology not unlike President Kennedy's," writes British Journalist Anthony Sampson in The New Europeans. "Clearly his presence fills some kind of psychological gap."
A City-State
At 47, "Gianni" Agnelli (pronounced Johnny An-yell-ie) lives in the style of an ancient Florentine prince. He is probably Italy's richest man and heaviest taxpayer—and he is, as well, an articulate social critic with a healthy appetite for life. His wife, a Neapolitan princess, is a renowned beauty and an energetic volunteer social worker as well as a society leader. The Agnellis have a couple of palaces and several retreats in the mountains and on the Italian Riviera. They travel among them in their own jet, helicopter and yachts. They socialize with the Henry Fords, Jackie and Ari Onassis, Rainier and Grace, and assorted Rothschilds—that is, when the head of the household is not busy talking Fiat business with Charles de Gaulle or Aleksei Kosygin.
Fiat is more than a company; it is a city-state. Most of its 157,000 employees work in 22 plants around smog-covered Turin. Their paychecks, which average $1.28 an hour for a 45-hour week, directly support 40% of the city's 1,300,000 population. Fiat has company housing, company resorts and entertainment, company clinics and sports teams—but few company strikes. There have been work stoppages on only 34 days in the past six years. Fiat also controls Turin's La Stampa (circ. 500,000), which is probably Italy's best daily after the Corriere della Sera. It far outsells the Communist daily L'Unita among Turin's workers. Like Agnelli, the paper is undogmatic, progressive and slightly left-of-center on most issues.
The giant that Gianni Agnelli operates last year had alltime-high sales of $2.1 billion. It turned out 1,750,000 cars as well as turbines, jet fighter planes, trucks, diesel engines and farm