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The Spender. With parsimony's contempt for popularity, the old enterpriser might have held unswerving to his moneymaking maxim to the end but for the prodigality of his eldest son. Balding young Mario Vaselli, having already spent millions on a moviemaking enterprise, a pet soccer team and lavish parties for Roman topers at his Frascati vineyards, betook himself to Naples. There he made a deal with Mayor Achille Lauro to build a new Municipal Square.
A few Neapolitan nights later, Lauro remembered that the square really ought to have fountains, gardens, and underground passages for pedestrians. Mario expansively agreed. Lauro then said it was a pity the whole square could not be ready within six months. Mario bet him $160,000 that it would be done before then. As they parted in the riotous dawn, Mario gave Lauro's city soccer team a $200,000 South American soccer player in token of friendship, and the mayor, not to be outgone, promised Mario a yacht. Putting his men to work at double pay, Mario finished the job. underground passages and all, five days before the deadline. But the bill had grown from $201,600 to $1,120,000. The national treasury refused to pay. Eventually Lauro lost his mayoralty, and Mario, unable to muster more than $3,200,000 assets to cover $11 million in debts, wound up in bankruptcy court.
Three hundred creditors closed in. and old Romolo Vaselli was faced with the choice of sacrificing either his maxim or his son. His younger son, Herbert, urged the second course: "Our name rests on money. With the money gone, we shall have no name. Your monuments stand, but they won't carry your name once you are poor." As the old man debated, Rome's real-estate market came to a dead stop and some 10,000 building workers faced unemployment because banks would make no loans until they saw how many apartment houses Vaselli would have to unload.
The Payoff. Last week an official announcement came out: "Differences between Count Mario Vaselli and his creditors have been settled out of court." Haggard, drawn, looking as if he had aged ten years (rumor said he had not eaten for three days), the old man paid half his son's debt to his biggest creditor, a Turin bank. Best estimate was that the man who had built Rome in his day had been compelled to part with no more than 2% or 3% of his fortune. But what hurt Romolo Vaselli was that, for the first time since he was a baker's errand boy running through Rome's reeking streets at the beginning of the century, he had to pay out more in a week than he could expect to take in in a month.