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Tire fast life decelerated sharply at 5 a.m. one day in 1952. Gianni was racing to Monte Carlo from a party in Cannes when his car skidded into a meat truck. He spent three months in a clinic in Florence. The accident left him with a stiff right leg—he still limps —but he denies any personal trauma besides distress that "I had not been able to let my friends know I would be late for lunch." Within a year, he settled down in Turin and, at 32, he married swan-necked Princess Marella Caracciolo di Castagneto. As Gianni's mother was, Marella is half-American; her own mother came from Peoria, Ill., and, on a trip to Italy, met and married Prince Filippo, Duke of Melito. Agnelli has played down the playboy image, but he still is occasionally the last man out of a nightclub. Recalling his earlier years, he says: "People had fun because they wanted to. Present-day playboys play for the public. Values today are of very bad quality. One may have had bad habits in the old days but never bad quality."
Agnelli went to work under Vittorio Valletta, a paternal technocrat who had been old Giovanni Agnelli's choice to rebuild Fiat after the war. With Mussolini gone, Valletta found an even better patron: the ordinary Italian consumer. In 1953, he brought out the tiny, tinny Fiat 500 model. Italy's first cheap mass-produced car, the 500 fit Valletta's prescription for something that could be made at the lowest possible cost, yet still be "a complete automobile." Italians dubbed it the "Mickey Mouse," and it proved to be for them what Ford's Tin Lizzie had been to Americans after World War I. At a price of less than $1,000, the car was an easy step up from the motor scooter; four passengers could squeeze into it—if they inhaled and exhaled in sync. The 500 is still Fiat's bestseller; it and a slightly larger version account for almost half of the cars sold in Italy over the past decade.
Such successes have made Fiat one of the few really big, privately owned Italian companies that do well in an unusual mixed economy where 20% to 25% of industry is held by government-controlled corporations. These corporations, which are concentrated in steel, transportation, construction and other basic industries, often have a privileged access to capital that leaves smaller private companies short of cash—an ill that has never befallen Fiat.
Almost alone among European car makers, Fiat has adopted Detroit's successful technique of expanding its model lines as its market grows more affluent. In 1964, Fiat introduced its 850, a mightier mouse but cheap enough (at $1,280) to sell well in that year's recession. Since then, largely at Gianni's urging, Fiat has followed Il Boom with medium-priced cars and then luxury models. In all, the company now builds 20 models, including its sporty 124, which is becoming Europe's Mustang, and the Fiat-Dino, a 120-m.p.h. job that costs $6,000. Unlike the earlier