Giovanni (Gianni) Agnelli

Gianni Agnelli, the “cultivated, American-oriented grandson of the founder of Fiat” (The New York Times 1967), visited New York, Los Angeles, and Ford's headquarters in Detroit for the first time in the late 1930s. This experience shaped his strong pro-Americanism, which became evident in the modernisation policies Agnelli introduced in FIAT during the following years, especially from 1966, when he took over as CEO. In accordance with the cultural institutions founded by Ford and Rockefeller, Agnelli established a foundation in Italy, named after his grandfather, to foster research in the field of social sciences and industrial progress. During the 1950s, Agnelli forged connections with the Kennedys, considerably widening his contacts within the international society, which already included individuals such as David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger, the latter National Security Advisor (1969-75) and Secretary of State of the US (1973-77).

The image of Gianni Agnelli as an icon of the Italian style – although at times idealised – quickly spread in the United States. Vogue dedicated an article to him and his wife Marella, Donna Marella and Giovanni Agnelli (Mulas 1969). Eccentric, a lover of la dolce vita and ambitious, he was labelled as “Italy's Henry Ford 2d” (Koshetz 1968). Agnelli was a multifaceted character. On the one hand, the press sensationalized his personal life, on the other it praised his business acumen and his commitment to projecting a more modern and international image of Italy abroad, an objective he achieved by strengthening FIAT's position overseas and sending the company's young executives to the US for training. Agnelli's name became synonymous with Italy's most modern and forward-looking car industry. His became a prominent voice, so much so that in 1971 he even penned an article in The New York Times, “Questions on Interchange of Goods”, in which he reflects on the likelihood for European industrial power to impose itself on the US.

Post-World War Italy and Turin are inextricably linked with the Agnelli family and FIAT, which marked crucial events of Italian history, such as the migration towards northern Italy in search of work and the workers' movements and strikes during the 1960s and 1970s. Nevertheless, it seems that this complex reality remained on the fringes of 20th-century literature. Examining the texts exported to the US, few of them appear to make reference to these two major players in the Italian scene, most often only briefly mentioned, as in Giovanni Arpino's The Novice, a Novel (1962), set in 1950s Turin, dominated by the neon signs of FIAT (“I go over to the window, lean on the sill, and stare across the river to where Turin sprawls, row upon row of interweaving street-lights, with those three vast Fiat neon-signs hemming them about at the city’s outer edge, turning the sky a smoky crimson”, Arpino 1962). Another example is provided by Cesare Pavese's Among Women Only (1959), which only incidentally mentions the fathers of Turin's car industry, without providing their names (“I had the vice of working, of never taking a holiday. ‘You're worse than those industrialist fathers,’ he said, ‘but at least they built Turin’" (Pavese 1959). In Vivante's short story The Short Cut (1961), a small, old and worn-out FIAT makes a romantic journey from France to Italy possible, while a brand-new Fiat features in the fictional movie scene scripted by Lillian Ross to offer a portray of director Federico Fellini (Ross 1965). Intriguingly, Nanni Balestrini’s Vogliamo Tutto (1971), a book which prominently explores the industrial reality of Turin in the post-war period, arrived much later in the US (We Want Everything, 2016). In his novel, Balestrini ponders on the working conditions at FIAT through the perspective of a southern emigrant, offering a different and insightful take on Turin's industrial phenomenon, an objective similarly pursued by the second issue of Root & Branch, a libertarian and socialist periodical (1971). 

Related Vectors

Documents

• "Italy: The struggles at Fiat '69" by Vittorio Rieser. Translated by Vicky De Grazia and John Sollenberger; "Italy: women in the Fiat factory." Root & Branch No. 2 (1971), pp. 11-21
• Photo gallery - Gianni Agnelli