Gianni Agnelli - The uncrowned King of Italy

This is how Federico Fellini liked to sketch Gianni Agnelli, a legendary figure of the twentieth century whose centenary falls this year: he was born in Turin on 12 March 1921.

Grandson of Giovanni Agnelli, senator of the Kingdom and founder of FIAT, Gianni was far more to Italy than a car magnate, and only a little less than a de facto emperor.

The second of seven children of Edoardo Agnelli and Virginia Bourbon del Monte of the Princes of San Faustino, he an established industrialist and she the daughter of a nobleman with half-American origins, he had the childhood expected of any scion of the time: school in Turin and then in America, punctuated by frequent trips between Forte dei Marmi and the villa on the Côte d'Azur.

Then came a family and personal tragedy, the first of many that would strike the Avvocato, up to the most terrible of all, the suicide of his son Edoardo in November 2000.

It was on the way back from a trip to Versilia in 1935, aboard a seaplane, that Gianni Agnelli's father died in a bizarre accident, to say the least.

Having stepped onto the wing of the aircraft after it landed on the water, and already posing for the photographers, he lost his balance and fell towards the propeller, which was still turning, and was in effect decapitated.

The tragedy was followed by a long legal battle over his mother Virginia's relationship with the charming journalist and writer Curzio Malaparte, considered inappropriate by many and above all by her father-in-law, Senator Giovanni Agnelli.

The head of FIAT tried by every means, police included, to take the children away from her and be appointed their guardian; the saving intervention came from Benito Mussolini, who took up the case and ensured that the children stayed with their mother.

So Gianni's destiny, then sixteen, began to take shape.

When he was barely over twenty, his grandfather Giovanni designated him to lead FIAT, the family car giant, with growing interests beyond Italy's borders as well.

An enormous responsibility, but one he took on with extraordinary maturity.

With the end of the Second World War and the fall of the House of Savoy, the young man from Turin immediately showed he had all the right qualities to inherit, metaphorically speaking, the sceptre of monarchical power left vacant by the exile of Italy's royal family.

In a short time the Agnellis became Italy's real Royal Family, a dynasty led by Gianni as a young sovereign at just 22 (the same fate that fell to his grandson John Elkann, designated by the Avvocato as his successor at the same age).

It is often said of him that life gave him everything, and without stint.

Handsome and extremely rich, a dandy and a gentleman, an honorary Avvocato for his ability to charm, influence and tell stories with words, and much more besides.

Utterly Italian in his deepest passions – football with his Juventus, fast cars and the gossip of many love affairs, in other words the three national obsessions – Agnelli was nonetheless elitist in every other expression of his inimitable way of living.

As a style icon he embodied the authentic spirit of the country better than anyone, then projected it into an entirely new cosmopolitan dimension, made of international connections with the elite of politics, business and the most prominent jet set of the time.

Gianni Agnelli was a peerless ambassador to the world for the Made in Italy he himself forged and strengthened, a skilful cocktail whose ingredients are la dolce vita, beauty and power; a King able to influence his country's customs constantly and comprehensively without ever neglecting anything, starting with the details, such as the iconic watch worn over his shirt cuff or the many quirks that fully described his personality.

But the collective imagination he created, and this is where his story becomes unique, is tightly bound to one of the key periods of Italy's rebirth.

His friend Henry Kissinger, US National Security Adviser and Secretary of State in the Nixon era, recalled that it was “dangerous to think something in his presence, because he would pick up on it”; Agnelli's intuition was in fact the quality that allowed him to steer an Italy destroyed by war, and therefore tormented by the scourge of unemployment, towards a model of success for the whole of the West.

It is no coincidence that the economic miracle of the 1950s coincided, in our country's history, with the boom of Fiat.

The explosion of the Italian car was an essential driver of industrial and social rebirth, the emblem of a nation able to race, innovate and set trends abroad, often on both sides of the divide, as shown by the coexistence of strong American ties and the factory city of Togliatti in the USSR, which the Avvocato himself pushed hard for despite growing fears of communist influence in Europe.

Gianni Agnelli's ambition was precisely to make FIAT an international company, deeply rooted abroad as well.

He tried in 1968 with an attempted takeover of Citroën, then in serious financial trouble, but managed to obtain no more than a small stake.

After selling the stake to Peugeot, he invested in plants in Yugoslavia, Turkey, Poland and Brazil.

His great foresight is shown by his conviction that the company, alone and without partnerships, would never be able to compete at the highest level in the future.

So began the rapprochement with General Motors, which ended in an agreement in the early 2000s that lasted only five years, and was then revived with the founding of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) and later Stellantis N.V. in January 2021.

Gianni Agnelli's importance has always been hard to quantify, going far beyond the role of manager and captain of industry.

The more his myth grew in the media, always courted by magazines, glossies and newspapers that placed him alongside heads of state and refined aristocrats, the more the value of Made in Italy solidified in collective perception and imagination.

It was the American weekly Newsweek that called him “a King without a crown”, confirming both Agnelli's extraordinary reputation and his skill as a communicator: he was one of the very first to understand every business's intrinsic need to communicate, build relationships and forge profitable ties at the highest possible level, right up to his last day, 24 January 2003.

His legacy is history.

An Italian story, indeed a decisive chapter in the history of Italy.

Gianni Agnelli was the man Italy needed to start again after the war, and perhaps also the prototype of the entrepreneur, charismatic manager, aesthete, humanist and ambassador of Italian identity that we would all need, today above all, to rebuild and shine in the world once more.