I met the lawyer Agnelli for the last time in December 2002. I had been designated as managing director of La Stampa, the newspaper not of Fiat, but his personal daily manifesto of a free, evolved country, attentive to international events. He was already very ill and received me in his bedroom. Always vigilant and curious about worldly things, we spoke about La Stampa, of which I was invited to safeguard the cultural roots and the long and glorious tradition of high journalistic professionalism, but we also spoke about Fiat which was going through a period of very acute crisis and the role that Montezemolo, who was enjoying great success with Ferrari, could have had in the company's revival.
I had met Agnelli for the first time in 1975 when he was president of Confindustria and I was a member of the editorial board of Il Sole 24 Ore. The newspaper was then beginning to leave its purely technical dimension as a quotation bulletin, to acquire that of an information organ for the entire Italian economy. To continue on this path we needed investments, but above all the publisher's agreement to leave total autonomy to the editorial staff so as to be able to gain that credibility which is the fundamental prerequisite for the possibility of attracting new readers. I therefore asked the lawyer if Confindustria intended to keep Il Sole 24 Ore as its own house organ, a deployment sheet, like l'Unità or il Popolo, or if it had the will and the courage to try to give the economy an independent information body "guardian of the market" rather than a spokesman for the interests of the industrial confederation. Agnelli was almost offended by this impertinence and replied that Confindustria had no need for a house organ, while the nascent Italian market needed free and reliable information to establish itself in the world. ”Try to do it – he said – if you are capable of it”. We did it and Il Sole which in 1975 sold 60-70 thousand copies arrived in 2000, when I was director, to exceed 400 thousand copies a day.
In my wanderings I met Agnelli many other times before going to work at Fiat as information relations manager. Every time he met me he would ask me if I was enjoying what I was doing. Work is work, I was trying to say. Yes, he replied, but if you don't learn something new, you don't enjoy it. When I was at Mattino di Napoli I interviewed him about a crucial Napoli-Juve match, and it was from that interview that he understood that football was not my strong suit!
Working at Fiat we had the opportunity to talk for a long time also because my office wrote the public interventions for him, for Romiti and for the entire top management. Before starting to write, I tried to understand what his thoughts were on the most varied topics, from politics to Europe, to the economic situation. He was passionate about contemporary history and we often talked about the latest book published on the Second World War and the fate of Italy.
Together we faced the story of Tangentopoli. The preparation of a speech by him at a conference organized by Confindustria in Venice was a via crucis. I took on the responsibility of making him say that yes, even in Fiat there had been deviations, but that it was one thing to have to give in to obtain rights and quite another thing to divide up the loot to do completely useless and fraudulent things. The warm applause of the audience marked the beginning of the recovery of Fiat's image in public opinion. Two years later the company experienced a spectacular recovery in sales and profits. After the announcement of the half-yearly results, in a very hot July in Turin, I collapsed and fell to the ground in a faint. Rushed to the hospital after a few hours I was home without serious consequences. The lawyer called me late in the evening and said, “What happened? Were you shocked by our brilliant budget results?”
He didn't trust Berlusconi. Partly because he was substantially against entrepreneurs in politics, and much because Berlusconi seemed to him more than an entrepreneur, a great storyteller, capable of naturally supporting one thing and the opposite of him. He was very angry when Spadolini was denied the presidency of the Senate and he said it openly at a conference of entrepreneurs who, however, did not like it at all and started making noise.
The truth is that he saw an Italy that was veering towards a plebiscitary populism which, in his opinion, would not have worked for the modernization of the country, but step by step would have favored his provincialism and his detachment from vital Western democracies. For this reason he fought without hesitation for entry into the Euro, even against the opinion of other entrepreneurs and Romiti himself, who believed that Italy was not ready to give up treating its own ills with the periodic devaluation of the lira.
He was a citizen of the world, but he was deeply attached to this country. He was aware of the responsibilities he and his family had towards Italy. He liked crowds and was proud of the popularity he enjoyed. Once in a square in a medium-sized city in the North, I wanted to help him extricate himself from the crowd that surrounded him by cheering him, Donna Marella stopped me and said: "Let him go a little longer, he likes it". Once you explained to me that Italians feel that he, Agnelli, was one of them: he had been with them during the war, he had enjoyed himself during the years of the economic boom, he suffered with them in the stadium. In short, for better or for worse, he had the same passions as the Italians and in the crucial moments he had been there and had made him part of him.
Only ten years have passed since his disappearance. Italy has changed quickly and not always for the better. Agnelli represents a period that will not return. And today we need, even more than before, a real ruling class that can set an example for the country, that is aware of the responsibilities that success in studies, politics or business entails towards the rest of society. We have to face a new reconstruction of Italy almost like in the post-war period. Agnelli will not be able to participate but his example will inspire those who consider themselves the ruling class and are candidates to manage the rebirth not only of our economy but of our society.
Read also: the story of Gianni Agnelli, edited by Aldo Bernacchi.
