Gianni Agnelli - business giant

Head of Fiat more powerful than politicians

Gianni Agnelli, pictured in 1986

The businessman Gianni Agnelli, who controlled the Italian car giant Fiat for 40 years until his death in 2003, was born on this day in 1921 in Turin.

Under his guidance, Fiat - Fabbrica Italiana di Automobili Torino, founded by his grandfather, Giovanni Agnelli, in 1899 - became so huge that at one time in the 1990s, literally every other car on Italy's roads was produced in one of their factories.

As its peak, Fiat made up 4.4 per cent of the Italian economy and employed 3.1 per cent of its industrial workforce.

Although cars remained Fiat's principal focus, the company diversified with such success, across virtually all modes of transport from tractors to Ferraris and buses to aero engines, and also into newspapers and publishing, insurance companies, food manufacture, engineering and construction, that there was a time when Agnelli controlled more than a quarter of the companies on the Milan stock exchange.

His personal fortune was estimated at between $2 billion and $5 billion, which made him the richest man in Italy and one of the richest in Europe.  It was hardly any surprise, then, that he became one of the most influential figures in Italy, arguably more powerful than any politician.  Throughout the rest of western democracy, he was treated more as a head of state than a businessman.

A rare picture of Gianni Agnelli (left) with his grandfather,
Giovanni Agnelli, the founder of FIAT, taken in 1940

He became known as 'l'avvocato' on account of having a law degree but he came to be regarded almost as royalty, Italy's uncrowned king.

Inevitably, Agnelli ran into confrontations with the Italian left and the Fiat workforce, most famously in 1979 when he engaged in a 35-day stand-off with the unions after responding to the latest of many strikes by shutting down Fiat's Mirafiori plant in Turin.  Ultimately, it was the workers who caved in, an estimated 40,000 of them joining a march demanding an end to the strike.

Yet many ordinary Italians continued to admire him.  He was the kind of figure many aspired to be, living a playboy lifestyle in the 1950s, when he acquired an enviable collection of fast cars and was romantically linked with a string of beautiful women, including actresses Rita Hayworth and Anita Ekberg, the socialite Pamela Churchill Harriman and even Jacqueline Bouvier, the future Jackie Kennedy.

A stylish if idiosyncratic dresser - he wore his wristwatch over his shirt cuff, for example, and never buttoned his button-down collars - he was also a football fan.  The Turin club Juventus had been in the ownership of the Agnelli family since 1923. Gianni ran the club personally between 1947 and 1954 and continued to own it until his death, often arriving at the training ground in his helicopter to chat to the players.

Gianni Agnelli with his wife, Marella, in 1966.

Agnelli, who was called Gianni by his family to distinguish him from his grandfather, was the eldest son of Edoardo Agnelli and Princess Virginia Bourbon del Monte di San Faustino.

Edoardo died in an air crash when Gianni was 14. Subsequently, he was brought up by English governesses. His grandfather was so determined to supervise his upbringing and groom him for his future role as head of the family he fought a custody battle with Princess Virginia.

Gianni studied law at the University of Turin, breaking off to join the army in 1941 before returning to complete his doctorate in 1943 after Italy's participation in the Second World War ended. Having lost a finger to frostbite on the Russian front, he won the Cross for Military Valour in North Africa but ended the war fighting against Germany on the side of the Allies.

When Giovanni died aged 79 in 1945, Fiat was initially placed in the control of its chairman, Vittorio Valetta. Although Gianni was made a vice-president, it was with his grandfather's blessing that he did not become involved. Shortly before he died, Giovanni told his grandson he should "have a fling for a few years" before devoting himself to the business and reputedly made him an allowance of $1 million a year to spend as he wished.

With houses in New York, St Moritz and the Cote d'Azur, Gianni became known for throwing extravagant parties and kept the company of Prince Rainier and the young Kennedys among others.

One of Agnelli's prized possessions during his fast car years -
a Maserati 5000 designed for him by Battista Pininfarina

But the years of self-indulgence came to an abrupt end in 1952 when, reputedly after a row with a girlfriend, he crashed his Ferrari into a lorry, breaking his right leg in six places. It was that incident which prompted him to abandon his hedonistic ways and take a more active part in Fiat, becoming managing director under Valetta in 1963.

He finally took charge of Fiat in 1966, when Valetta retired, and under his guidance Fiat rapidly overtook Volkswagen, its main competitor in the popular market. New factories were opened in Russia and Eastern Europe.

The economic slump of the mid-1970s hit the company hard. It did not help that Fiat had become to many on the left a symbol of Italian post-War capitalism, which was probably why it was targeted by Red Brigade terrorists. Many Fiat executives were attacked. Agnelli lived for some years under constant guard.

His methods were not always universally admired - to raise cash, for example, he sold 10 per cent of Fiat to the Libyan government, under Colonel Gaddafi - but over the next 20 years he rebuilt the company's prosperity.

He was married in 1953 to Princess Marella Caracciolo di Castagneto, who hailed from an ancient Neapolitan family, and although there were rumours of extramarital affairs the couple stayed together for 50 years until he died. Tragedy struck his personal life, however, when his only son, Edoardo, died in 2000 in an apparent suicide after battling with a heroin addiction.  His nephew, Giovanni Alberto Agnelli, who was seen as Gianni's likeliest successor as head of the company, also died young, of a rare form of cancer, at the age of 33.

A huge crowd gathered at Turin Cathedral for Agnelli's funeral

This created a succession problem that persuaded Agnelli to remain in the chair until he was 75, at which point he handed control to his long-time number two, Cesare Romiti.

Agnelli remained honorary chairman until his death in Turin in 2003 from prostate cancer, aged 81.  His funeral, broadcast live on the Rai Uno television channel, took place at Turin Cathedral.  A crowd of around 100,000 people gathered outside.

Fiat is now a subsidiary of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, having been rescued from the brink of bankruptcy by Sergio Marchionne just a year after Agnelli's death, following a failed partnership with General Motors.

The Agnelli family still has a presence in the business. John Elkann, the son of Gianni and Marella's daughter, Margherita, is Fiat Chrysler's president.

The Agnelli villa at Villar Perosa in Piedmont

Travel tip:

The Agnelli family estate, where Gianni's widow, Marella, continued to live after his death, is in the village of Villar Perosa, about 40km (25 miles) south-west of Turin.  The estate has been in the family since 1811.  Agnelli is buried in the family chapel there.

Hotels in Villar Perosa by Booking.com

The vast Fiat plant at Lingotto was redesigned by the
architect Renzo Piano. The rooftop test track remains

Travel tip:

The former Fiat plant in the Lingotto district of Turin was once the largest car factory in the world, built to a linear design by the Futurist architect Giacomo Matte Trucco and featuring a rooftop test track made famous in the Michael Caine movie, The Italian Job. Redesigned by the award-winning contemporary architect Renzo Piano, it now houses concert halls, a theatre, a convention centre, shopping arcades and a hotel, as well as the Automotive Engineering faculty of the Polytechnic University of Turin. The former Mirafiori plant, situated about 3km (2 miles) from the Lingotto facility, is now the Mirafiori Motor Village, where new models from the Fiat, Alfa Romeo, Lancia and Jeep ranges can be test driven on the plant's former test track.

More reading:

Why the man who rescued Fiat divides opinion

How Giovanni Agnelli saw the potential of the 'horseless carriage'

The insult that inspired Ferruccio Lamborghini

Also on this day:

1501: The birth of doctor and botanist Pietro Andrea Mattioli

1863: The birth of politician and playwright Gabriele D'Annunzio

Selected books:

Mondo Agnelli: Fiat, Chrysler, and the Power of a Dynasty, by Jennifer Clark

(Picture credits: Maserati by Buch-t; Funeral by JD82; Lingotto plant by SurfAst; via Wikimedia Commons)


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Rigoletto debuts at La Fenice

Verdi opera staged after battle with censors

Giuseppe Verdi - a photograph
taken in 1850

Giuseppe Verdi's opera Rigoletto was performed for the first time on this day in 1851 in Venice.

It enjoyed a triumphant first night at La Fenice opera house, where the reaction of the audience was particularly gratifying for the composer and his librettist, Francesco Maria Piave, after a long-running battle to satisfy the censors.

Northern Italy was controlled by the Austrian Empire at the time and a strict censorship process applied to all public performances.

Verdi, who had accepted a commission to write an opera for La Fenice the previous year, knew he was likely to risk falling foul of the Austrians when he chose to base his work on Victor Hugo's play, Le roi s'amuse, which provoked such a scandal when it premiered in Paris in 1832 that it was cancelled after one night and had remained banned across France ever since.

Hugo's play depicted a king - namely Francis I of France - as a licentious womaniser who paid only lip service to what was considered moral behaviour as he constantly sought new conquests.

The French government had been horrified by the play's disrespectful portrayal of a monarch and the Austrians, wary of anything that might corrupt the morals of the people or, worse still, provoke a revolt against the ruling classes, were never likely to take a more lenient view.

Rigoletto was the seventh of 10 Verdi operas for
 which Francesco Maria Piave wrote the libretto 

It meant that Verdi and Piave had to go to enormous lengths to see that their version met with official approval, having been warned from the start that such a scandalous story would never be permitted.

The first version they submitted for review, entitled La maledizione (The Curse) was knocked back immediately, the Austrian censor describing it as 'a repugnant example of immorality and obscene triviality'.

They moved the plot from France to Italy and made the main character a duke rather than a king.  The new title, Rigoletto, was the name given to the central character, the hunchback jester, who called Triboulet in Hugo's play.

The debaucherous monarch became the Duke of Mantua, a title that no longer existed, and his background was said to have been in the House of Gonzaga, which had long been extinct. With the alteration or removal of some of the more salacious scenes in Hugo's narrative, they were at last given the green light.

Watch Luciano Pavarotti, at his peak in 1987, singing La donna è mobile

The controversial subject matter almost guaranteed a full house, but it also attracted considerable outside attention. It was not unknown at the time for musical scores to be stolen and copied, and Verdi was wary of the threat.

Although he had completed the composition by early February, he kept it under lock and key, arriving at rehearsals with only the sections to be practised that day. The performers were trusted with possession of the score only in the last days before the premiere.

Felice Varesi was the first
to sing as Rigoletto

The young tenor Raffaele Mirate, cast as the Duke, was instructed that he was not allowed even to hum or whistle the tune of La donna è mobile, the aria that would be the show-stopper, except during rehearsals.  Other members of the cast had not heard it at all until a few hours before the curtain went up.

With the baritone Felice Varesi cast as Rigoletto and the soprano Teresa Brambilla as his daughter, Gilda, the opera shared a double bill with the ballet Faust, by Giacomo Panizza. La Fenice was packed to the rafters and street singers were reprising La donna è mobile as early as the next morning.

Rigoletto was Verdi's first major Italian triumph since the 1847 premiere of Macbeth in Florence. After an initial run of 13 performances, it returned to La Fenice the following year and by 1852 it had premiered in all the major cities of Italy. Soon it was being performed around the world. The United Kingdom premiere took place in May 1853 in what is now the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. It was first seen in the United States in February 1855 at New York's Academy of Music.

In modern times, it has become one of the 10 most performed operas in the world. The Duke of Mantua's arias, particularly La donna è mobile and Questa o quella, became staples on recital discs for all of the great tenors, from Enrico Caruso, who numbered them among his earliest recordings in 1902, to Luciano Pavarotti.

The monument to Verdi in the centre
of Busseto, his place of birth

Travel tip:

Giuseppe Verdi came from Busseto, a town in Emilia-Romagna equidistant almost from Parma, Piacenza and Cremona. The area has plenty to offer Verdi fans, who can visit the house where he was born, in 1813, in the village of Le Roncole, the churches of Santa Maria degli Angeli and San Michele Arcangelo, where he played the organ, the Palazzo Orlandi and the Villa Verdi, two of his homes, the Teatro Giuseppe Verdi, which was named in his honour, and the Casa Barezzi, the home of his patron, Antonio Barezzi, which now houses a permanent exhibition of objects and documents related to Verdi and the Barezzi family.

Look for hotels in Busseto with Booking.com

Travel tip:

Teatro La Fenice, owned by the Municipality of Venice, was founded in 1792. In the 19th century, the theatre staged the world premieres of numerous operas, including Rossini’s Tancredi, Sigismondo and Semiramide, Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi and Beatrice di Tenda, Donizetti’s Belisario, Pia de’ Tolomei and Maria de Rudenz, and Verdi’s Ernani, Attila, Rigoletto, La traviata and Simon Boccanegra.  Originally the Teatro San Benedetto, it was reborn as La Fenice - the Phoenix - after being destroyed by fire. It was badly damaged by further fires in 1836 and 1996, on the last occasion remaining closed for eight years.

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More reading:

How La Fenice keeps rising from the ashes

The death of Giuseppe Verdi - how Italy mourned the loss of a national symbol

Why Luciano Pavarotti was known as the king of the high Cs

Also on this day:

1544: The birth of the poet Torquato Tasso

1847: The birth of First World War statesman Sidney Sonnino

1924: The birth of psychiatrist Franco Basaglia, the man who closed Italy's asylums

(Picture credit: Statue by Libera latino via Wikimedia Commons)


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Lorenzo Da Ponte - writer and impresario

Colourful life of Mozart's librettist

Lorenzo da Ponte, as depicted in a 19th
century engraving by Michele Pekenino

The librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte, who could be described on two counts as a figure of considerable significance in the story of opera, was born on this day in 1749 in Ceneda - since renamed Vittorio Veneto - about 42km (26 miles) north of Treviso in the Veneto region.

Da Ponte wrote the words for 28 operas by 11 composers, including three of Mozart's greatest successes, Don Giovanni, The Marriage of Figaro and Così fan tutte.

He also opened New York City's first opera house in 1833 at the age of 84 and is credited with introducing the United States both to Mozart and Gioachino Rossini.

To say Da Ponte led a colourful life would be putting it mildly.

He was born Emanuele Conegliano at a time when Ceneda was a strongly Jewish community. His mother, Rachele, died when he was only five and at the age of 14 he was baptised as a Catholic along with his father, who wanted to marry a Catholic girl but could do so only if he converted.

In accordance with tradition, Emanuele took the name of the priest who baptised him, in his case the Bishop of Ceneda, Lorenzo Da Ponte.

Through the Bishop's influence, Emanuele and his two brothers were enrolled in the seminary of Ceneda and Lorenzo was ultimately ordained as a priest.  By then he had begun writing poetry.  One of his earliest pieces - curiously, given his calling - was entitled An Ode to Wine.

The front page of a programme for the
presentation of the Marriage of Figaro

He moved to Venice in 1773 to be the priest of the church of San Luca, although his lifestyle was hardly befitting of a man of the cloth.  He fell into the company of members of minor Venetian nobility who were penniless but whom convention forbade to work and were therefore obliged to turn to gambling and debauchery to make a living.

Although he was a Catholic priest, Da Ponte took a mistress, who bore him two children but manipulated him into parting with money, largely to support her gambling-addicted brother. Ultimately Da Ponte was charged with 'public concubinage' and 'abduction of a respectable woman' and it was alleged in court that he had been living in a brothel. He was found guilty and banished from Venice for 15 years.

He fled to Gorizia, nowadays a town on the border of Italy and Slovenia but then part of Austria, where he lived as a writer. In time his friend Caterino Mazzolà, the poet of the Saxon court, invited him to Dresden, where he was given a letter of introduction to the composer Antonio Salieri.

With Salieri's help, Da Ponte obtained the post of librettist to the Italian Theatre in Vienna.  As court poet and librettist, Da Ponte collaborated with Mozart, Salieri and Vicente Martín y Soler. As well as writing, between 1786 and 1790, the libretti in Italian for the three aforementioned Mozart operas, he enjoyed commercial success with Soler's Una cosa rara.

His fortunes changed with the death of the Austrian Emperor Joseph II in 1790, after which he was dismissed from the Imperial Service. Unable to return to Venice, he set off for Paris but on learning of the worsening political situation in France, and the arrest of the king and queen, he rerouted to London, accompanied by a new companion, Nancy Grahl, with whom he eventually had four children.

St Patrick's Cathedral in Mulberry Street in
Manhattan attracted thousands to the funeral

In London, he was briefly a grocer and then an Italian teacher before in 1803 becoming librettist at the King's Theatre. Financial stability eluded him, however, and in 1805, after a number of theatrical and publishing ventures failed, the threat of bankruptcy persuaded him to uproot again, this time to the United States, where Nancy and other members of his family had relocated a year earlier.

After arriving in Philadelphia, Da Ponte went first to Sunbury, Pennsylvania, where again he ran a grocery store and gave Italian lessons. He moved to New York to open a bookstore, at the same time taking an unpaid appointment as the first professor of Italian literature at Columbia College.

Determined to spread the Italian culture in the United States, he collaborated in 1825 with the Spanish baritone and entrepreneur Manuel García to stage the first performance in New York of Mozart's Don Giovanni. He also introduced the United States to Rossini's music.

In 1828, at the age of 79, Da Ponte became a naturalised US citizen and five years later founded the New York Opera Company. He was no more adept at business than he had ever been, however, and the company had to be disbanded after two seasons and the theatre sold to pay the company's debts.

Twice, in 1839 and 1841, the theatre was destroyed by fire, yet from the ashes rose the New York Academy of Music and the New York Metropolitan Opera.

Da Ponte died in New York in 1838 and it was a measure of the affection he had accrued that his funeral at the city's historic St. Patrick's Cathedral on Mulberry Street in the area known as Little Italy attracted thousands of mourners. There is a memorial to him in Calvary Cemetery in Queens, although it is thought he was actually buried at a church in lower Manhattan.

Travel tip:

In 1866, soon after the Veneto was annexed by the Kingdom of Italy, the towns of Ceneda and Serravalle were joined into one city named after the King of Italy, Vittorio Emanuele.  During the First World War, Vittorio was the site of the last battle between Italy and Austria-Hungary, won by Italian troops. The suffix "Veneto" was added to the city's name in 1923 as a commemoration of the victory and many Italian cities now have a Via Vittorio Veneto, the most famous of which became the centre of Rome's 'Dolce Vita' culture in the 1950s.

Hotels in Venice from Expedia

The Chiesa di San Luca in Venice

Travel tip:

The Chiesa di San Luca in Venice, where Da Ponte was priest, can be found next to the Rio de San Luca canal in the San Marco district. It has a simple facade but inside can be found frescoes by Sebastiano Santi, and altarpieces by Paolo Veronese and Palma il Giovane. 

Hotels in Venice from Hotels.com


More reading:

Antonio Scotti - the Neapolitan Baritone who spent 35 years at the Met

How Tito Gobbi found global fame

La Traviata - the world's favourite opera



Also on this day:

1872: The death of revolutionary patriot Giuseppe Mazzini

1900: The birth of architectural sculptor Corrado Parnucci

Selected books:

Memoirs Of Lorenzo Da Ponte (New York Review Books Classics)

Lorenzo Da Ponte: The Extraordinary Adventures of the Man Behind Mozart, by Rodney Bolt 

(Picture credits: St Patrick's Cathedral by Jim.henderson; Chiesa di San Luca by Godromil; via Wikimedia Commons)


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Emma Bonino – politician

Leading Radical learnt Arabic to understand Middle East press

Radical politician Emma Bonino

Veteran politician Emma Bonino, who most recently served as Minister of Foreign Affairs in the Government of Enrico Letta, was born on this day in 1948 in Bra in Piedmont.

A leading member of the Italian Radicals, Bonino has throughout her career been an activist for reform policies and a campaigner for women's and human rights.

Bonino graduated in modern languages and literature from Bocconi University in Milan in 1972. She founded the Information Centre on Sterilisation and Abortion in 1975 and promoted the referendum that led to the legalisation of abortion in Italy.

She was first elected to the Italian Chamber of Deputies in 1976 and was re-elected six times afterwards.

In 1986 Bonino was among the promoters of a referendum against nuclear energy, which led to the rejection of a civil nuclear energy programme in Italy.

Emma Bonino meets British Foreign Secretary William
Hague in 2013 during her time as Minister of Foreign Affairs

She was appointed minister for international trade in the cabinet of Romano Prodi in 2006 but resigned her post in 2008 after being elected a vice president of the Senate. She had previously been elected to a seat in the Senate on the list of the Democratic party for the Piedmont Constituency.

Bonino was elected to the European parliament in 1979 and re-elected twice afterwards. Along with the late Marco Pannella, another Radical politician, Bonino has battled for civil rights, individual liberty, and sexual and religious freedom.

She has particularly fought for an end to capital punishment, female genital mutilation and world hunger.

In 2001 Bonino moved to Cairo to learn Arabic and in 2003 she started a daily review of the Arabic press on Radical Radio. She is able to follow the Al Jazeera broadcasts and read the main Middle East daily newspapers. Bonino is a Board member of the Arab Democracy Foundation and has become an authoritative expert and commentator on problems in the Middle East.

Emma Bonino with Socialist President Sandro Pertini
on the March for Peace in Rome in 1985

In 2004 she organised the first conference on democracy and human rights ever held in the Arab world.

Among awards she has received for protecting human rights are the North-South prize, the Open Society Prize, the Prix Femmes d’Europe and the America Award. She was named European of the Year in 1996.

Bonino is a godmother to Countess Luana, the elder daughter of her friends, the late Prince Friso and Princess Mabel of Orange-Nassau.

The Corso Cottolengo in Bra, looking towards Piazza
Caduti per la Libertà and the church of Andrea Apostolo

Travel tip:

The town of Bra, where Emma Bonino was born, is in the province of Cuneo in Piedmont, 50 km (31 miles) south of Turin. The Slow Food movement was founded in Bra in 1989 and every two years, Cheese, the most important international event devoted to high quality cheese, is held in Bra. A few kilometres away from Bra in the town of Pollenzo, the University of Gastronomic Sciences was founded in 2004, the first university in the world entirely dedicated to the culture of food.

Hotels in Bra by Booking.com

Travel Tip:

Bocconi University in Milan, where Emma Bonino studied modern languages and literature, is a prestigious, private university founded in 1902 by Ferdinando Bocconi. The first Italian University to grant a degree in economics, Bocconi is located in Via Roberto Sarfatti, south of Milan city centre and not far from the Navigli district.

More reading:

How anti-Fascist politician Sandro Pertini became the people's President

Enrico Berlinguer - the politician who gave Italian Communists political respectability

The growing popularity of comedian-turned-activist Beppe Grillo

Also on this day:

1454: The birth of explorer Amerigo Vespucci

1809: The birth of statesman and winemaker Bettino Ricasoli

1908: The founding of football club Internazionale

(Picture credits: Bra by Davide Papalini via Wikimedia Commons)

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