In the Rai archives, dusted off from time to time in the history and customs schedules, there is the investigative journey on Pirelli that Giulio Macchi filmed in 1963, when Bicocca was an immense headquarters of tires and cables bordering the chimneys of Breda and the Falck steelworks in Sesto. It was the Milan of large factories, all industry and manufactured goods, the most authentic image of the Italian miracle which had reached its apogee in those years.
At the helm of Pirelli was again Alberto Pirelli, who proudly showed the television cameras the thirty-two floors of the new skyscraper which, thanks to the magic of Giò Ponti, had risen in front of the central station to the point of exceeding the height of the cathedral itself. At his side, ready to inherit, was his son, Leopoldo Pirelli, then thirty-eight years old, whom Macchi interviewed at the foot of the Pirellone. An interview that reveals ever since then what was the style and class with which Pirelli - whose sixth anniversary of death falls this January - played the role of entrepreneur-chief in the almost thirty years that he led the group, from 1965 until to 1992.
"Engineer, then for the interview we'll meet again around three .." - at one point Macchi told him. Macchi, a Lombard by birth but who had lived in Rome for years, did not have time to finish the sentence when he was politely but peremptorily retorted: “See you at three. This is how it is done here at Pirelli. With us there is a precise time, with no verse and no approximately”. And this rigorous sense of punctuality always accompanied him in his life.
And a lesson on the subject also fell to a journalist from the Sole-24 Ore, which was me, when Leopoldo Pirelli, in 1999, decided to leave all his posts, passing the presidency of Pirellina to Marco Tronchetti Provera as well. The engineer had decided to meet in his office in via Negri, one at a time, exactly one hour each, the journalists of the major newspapers who had covered the events of his Pirelli.
Appointment at 12 o'clock, when I arrived in front of the engineer Leopoldo, the clock hanging on the wall in front of Pirelli's desk indicated 12.05. The engineer, after a cordial welcome, began to recount his life, his successes but also his unfortunate campaigns to climb first Firestone and then Continental. He expressed great esteem for Cuccia and Mediobanca, the family bankhaus, even though in the German adventure that led to his exit from the command of Pirellona something had gone wrong in the historic alliance. He reaffirmed his full trust in Tronchetti and in his leadership: the only thing he didn't share with the actions taken by his ex-son-in-law – the Telecom operation would take place two years later – was the sponsorship of Inter. "For me, who has always been a Milan fan, you can understand me...".
He then said that he continued to distrust Martin Ebner, the Swiss financier who became a minority partner of Pirelli when Tronchetti's chain of control was shortened with the disappearance of Pirelli Internationale in Basel. Pirelli did not forget how one day many years ago Ebner had plotted to take over the group. Since then Pirelli no longer wanted to see him. The engineer then spoke of sailing, his passion; of the role of his son Alberto in the group; how he imagined Pirelli in the millennium that was about to arrive, and more. Pirelli looked at his watch. It was one o'clock. “I have to dismiss her,” he said. "Such a pity. With you as an engineer today it would have been nice to linger for hours”, I replied. And he is always polite but dry: "We would have talked five more minutes if he had arrived on time".
He gave me a few more seconds just to explain that he had learned to be punctual since he was still in his early twenties when he arrived at La Scala once the show had begun. "Looking for a seat in the stalls, among the people already seated, I felt an unease and an embarrassment that I have never forgotten".
Pirelli will die on January 23, 2007. Around the same time four years earlier, on the morning of January 24, 2003, Gianni Agnelli had passed away exhausted by illness. Fate somehow wanted to unite again in their farewell to life the two symbolic characters of the great private industry of the post-war period, undisputed leaders of Italian capitalism under the tutelage of Cuccia and Mediobanca, folkloristic target of protest and union struggles of the seventies to the cry of “Agnelli, Pirelli, twin thieves”. Characters and seasons of an industrial Italy that no longer exists.
