Piero Dusio - sportsman and entrepreneur

His Cisitalia company revolutionised automobile design

The Cisitalia 202 set new standards in sports car design
that changed the way automobiles looked

The footballer, racing driver and businessman Piero Dusio was born on this day in 1899 in Scurzolengo, a village in the hills above Asti, in Piedmont.

Dusio made his fortune in textiles but it is for his postwar venture into car production that he is most remembered. Dusio’s Cisitalia firm survived for less than 20 years before going bankrupt in the mid-1960s but in its short life produced a revolutionary car - the Cisitalia 202 - that was a gamechanger for the whole automobile industry.

Dusio played football for the Turin club Juventus, joining the club at 17 years old, and was there for seven years before a knee injury forced him to retire at the age of only 24, having made 15 appearances for the senior team, four of them in Serie A matches.

Piero Dusio was a former footballer
who made his fortune in textiles

He kept his connection with the club and from 1942 to 1948 was Juventus president. In the short term, though, he was forced to find a new career. He took a job with a Swiss-backed textile firm in Turin as a salesman. He took to the job immediately and made an instant impression on his new employers, selling more fabric in his first week than his predecessor had in a year.  Within a short time he had been placed in charge of sales for the whole of Italy.

In 1926, at the age of 27, Dusio opened his own textile company, producing Italy's first oil cloth.

By the 1930s he had a portfolio of business interests that included banking, tennis racket manufacture and racing bicycles. In the textile business he branched out into uniforms and casual clothing. He made his fortune after landing a contract with Mussolini to supply military uniforms for the Italian army. Demand for his waterproof canvas products also soared.

His personal wealth enabled him to indulge his passion for motor racing. He bought himself a Maserati and regularly raced. He finished sixth in the Italian Grand Prix of 1937 and won his class in the Mille Miglia in 1937 driving a 500cc SIATA Sport.

In 1938 he finished third overall in the Mille Miglia and won the Stelvio hillclimb. War then intervened but once it had finished Dusio was eager to resume his career in the cockpit.

The Cisitalia D46 was the first car to be produced
by Piero Dusio's new company

Yet Italy’s economy was on the floor at that stage with most of its industry destroyed. Dusio realised that it might be unrealistic to expect the expensive sport of motor racing to pick up exactly where it left off.

With that in mind, he created his new company - the Consorzio Industriale Sportivo Italia, Cisitalia for short - with a plan to produce a single-seater racing car cheap enough to tempt the amateur.  He commissioned the Fiat engineer, Dante Giacosa, famous for the Fiat 500 Topolino to design it and soon the Cisitalia D46 was born.

Dusio's dream of a one-model series featuring only the D46 came to nothing, but the car scored multiple successes, particularly in the hands of drivers as talented as the brilliant Tazio Nuvolari, winner of 24 Grands Prix in the pre-Formula One era.

He overstretched himself somewhat with his next project, paying a fortune to extract the legendary German engineer Ferdinando Porsche - a Nazi party member - from a French prison. Porsche’s innovative but complex mid-engined Cisitalia 360 was a triumph of engineering but ultimately proved too expensive for Dusio to support.

Battista 'Pinin' Farina is said to have made
his reputation with his work on the 202

Yet Dusio was not done.  In 1945, he took on another Fiat man, their young head of aviation, Giovanni Savonuzzi, with the idea of building a two-seater commercial coupé based on the D46.  Their project was taken up by Battista ‘Pinin’ Farina, who came up with the Cisitalia 202 Coupé.

The car was not a commercial success. It was priced higher than rival cars from Jaguar and Porsche that offered better performance. In the end, fewer than 200 were built.

Yet its design - the one that made Farina’s reputation, although it closely followed Savonuzzi’s preliminary sketches - is credited with changing the way cars look, setting an entirely new standard - a template for the way sports cars look even today.

Whereas road cars traditionally had been a collection of elements - cabin, hood, grill, fenders, headlights etc - with no real thought for aerodynamics, at least until the late 1930s, the Cisitalia 202 was a single unit. The headlights and the grill were perfectly aligned elements of the hood, the wheels were entirely inside the body, removing the need for separate fenders, and the cabin tapered in a smooth line to the rear.

Savonuzzi had applied to his sketches all he had learned about airflow in his aviation work and Farina had put his ideas into practice. The result was a beautiful design that was likened to a sculpture.  When the Museum of Modern Art in New York became the first museum to exhibit automobiles as examples of functional design, the 202 was the first vehicle to enter their collection.

For all that, Dusio could not sell enough cars to rescue his ailing company and the only way he could continue his career was to accept an offer of support from the government of Argentina to set up in car production in Buenos Aires, where he would remain until his death in 1975 at the age of 76.

Cisitalia continued to be run by his son, Carlo Dusio, but was made bankrupt in 1965.

The cathedral in Asti dates back to the 11th century

Travel tip:

The village of Scurzolengo is just over 15km (9 miles) northeast of Asti, a city of just over 75,000 inhabitants about 55 km (34 miles) east of Turin. The city enjoyed many years of prosperity in the 13th century when it occupied a strategic position on trade routes between Turin, Milan, and Genoa. The area between the centre and the cathedral is rich in medieval palaces and merchants’ houses, the owners of which would often compete with their neighbours to build the tallest towers. Asti was once known as the City of 100 Towers, although in fact there were 120, of which a number remain, including the Torre Comentina, the octagonal Torre de Regibus and Torre Troyana.

The strikingly modern Museo Nazionale dell' Automobile
is a major tourist attraction in Turin

Travel tip:

With a long history in motor vehicle design and manufacturing - Fiat, Lancia, Iveco, Pininfarina, Bertone, Giugiaro, Ghia and Cisitalia were all founded in the city - it is hardly surprising that Turin is home to Italy’s most important automobile museum, the Museo Nazionale dell’Automobile (also known as MAUTO).  Opened in 1960 and dedicated to Giovanni Agnelli, founder of FIAT, the museum’s building and permanent exhibition were completely renovated in 2011. The MAUTO, in  Corso Unità d'Italia, is today one of Turin’s most popular tourist attractions.

More reading:

Was Tazio Nuvolari the greatest driver of them all?

The 'smallest brother' who became a giant of the car industry

The brilliance of engineer Vittorio Jano

Also on this day:

54AD: The suspicious death of the emperor Claudius

1815: The execution of Napoleon's military strategist Joachim Murat


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Maria Redaelli - supercentenarian

Inter fan who was the oldest living person in Europe

Crowds turned out in Novate Milanese as Maria arrived
for a party to celebrate her 113th birthday

Maria Angela Redaelli, a supercentenarian who for 10 months was the oldest living person in Europe and for 14 months the oldest living person in Italy, was born on this day in 1899 in Inzago in Lombardy.

She died in 2013 on the eve of what would have been her 114th birthday, at which point she was the fourth oldest living person in the world, behind the Japanese supercentenarians Jiroemon Kimura and Misao Okawa, and the American Gertrude Weaver.

Kimura died two months later at the age of 116 years and 54 days, which is the most advanced age reached by any male in the history of the human race, according to verifiable records.

Okawa and Weaver survived for another two years, Okawa reaching 117 years and 27 days, which made her the fifth oldest woman in history at the time, although she has since been overtaken by the Italian Emma Morano, who is still living in Pallanza on Lake Maggiore and is, at 117 years and 124 days, the oldest person on the planet of verifiable age.

Maria with her personal Inter shirt

At the time of her death, Maria was living in Novate Milanese, a suburb of Milan, being looked after by her 88-year-old daughter Carla and her grandson, Lamberto. She outlived her son, Luigi, by nine years.

Most of Maria’s working life was spent in a silk spinning mill, where she had a job for more than 40 years.  Her husband, Gaspare, was a steelworker employed by the locomotive and aircraft manufacturer, Breda, in the Milan suburb of Sesto San Giovanni, where they lived for much of their married life.

She and Gaspare, whom she married in 1923, were together for 56 years until he died in 1979 at the age of 81.

Although she had some problems with her hearing and vision, she remained in generally good health even until her last days. Mentally sharp, she read magazines and newspapers and followed the fortunes of her favourite Milan football team, Internazionale, on television.

When she suffered a broken thigh in a fall in 2003, it was the first time in 104 years that she had needed to go into hospital.

Maria's all-time favourite Inter player,
the 1960s star Sandro Mazzola

On her 113th birthday, the Mayor of Novate Milanese hosted a party in Maria’s honour at the town hall. A police car picked her up at her daughter’s home, the mode of transport chosen because Italian police cars display the emergency telephone number 113.

At the town hall, she was surprised when the chief executive of Inter, Ernesto Paolillo, arrived with Bedy Moratti, sister of the club president, Massimo Moratti, and presented her with an Inter football shirt with her name on the back, and the number 113.

On previous occasions, she had met Inter stars Ivan Ramiro Cordoba and Javier Zanetti, although her favourite players were from a different era.

She admired Giuseppe Meazza, Inter’s prolific forward of the 1930s, after whom Milan’s municipal stadium – shared by Inter and AC Milan – was named.

Her real idol, though, was Sandro Mazzola, the goalscoring midfielder who starred in the Inter team that won the European Cup twice and the Serie A title three times in the 1960s.

She passed away in her sleep on the eve of another party planned for her, having already received a telegram of congratulations from the President of the Italian Republic, Giorgio Napoletano.

The Villa Rey is one of a number of elegant residences
that line the Martesana Canal in Inzago

Travel tip:

Inzago was a small town of 4,500 people when Maria Redaelli was born, halfway betweeen Milan and Bergamo and with farmland all around it. Today, the population has more than doubled and it is part of the Milan metropolitan area, although its farming roots are still strong and a cattle fair is held in the town every Monday.  The town is divided in two by the Martesana Canal, which has a number of elegant villas – once the summer residences of noble Milanese families – along its banks.

The suburb of Sesto San Giovanni today

Travel tip:

Sesto San Giovanni, the northernmost point on the Milan M1 metro line, is another place to have seen massive change since Maria and her husband Gaspare moved there in the 1920s, when it had a population of just over 15,000.  At that time it was an expanding industrial centre, the base for several large companies in the steel and motor industries but also the Campari drinks company.  The years after the Second World War saw a huge influx of migrants from other parts of Italy, attracted by the job possibilities. Today, the area is a busy suburb with more than 85,000 inhabitants. Many of the factories closed during the economic crisis of the 1990s and the current employers are more in the service sector, such as the telecommunications company, WIND.

More reading:

Giuseppe Meazza - Italian football's first superstar

Why Italy could not chose between Sandro Mazzola and Gianni Rivera

Internazionale - the breakaway club conceived over dinner at a Milan restaurant

Also on this day:

1881: The birth of Italy's post-war prime minister Alcide de Gasperi

(Picture credits: Maria arrives and with shirt by Andre86; Villa Rey by MarkusMark; Sesto San Giovanni by Maksim; all via Wikimedia Commons)

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