Visionary, style icon, sportsman capable of making Italians dream with the “Moro di Venezia” boat. But from a certain moment on – when he set his mind on becoming the master of chemistry – he was no longer able to think and behave like a true captain of industry. Carlo Sama dismantles the myth of Raul Gardini in his book “The Fall of an Empire”, part essay and part novel, published by Rizzoli. A strong book, that of the “corsair’s” brother-in-law, which touches on a character in the Italian collective imagination, comparable in terms of charm only to Gianni Agnelli and Silvio Berlusconi. An example for entrepreneurs and managers who aroused more empathy than Agnelli, because Gardini was the “son of a farmer”, and not the designated heir of a dynasty.

The Rai documentary film

However, in 1979 Gardini found himself the heir to his wife’s dynasty, due to the tragic plane crash of his father-in-law Serafino Ferruzzi, founder of the agri-food group of the same name from Ravenna. In the book, Sama reconstructs the epic story of his brother-in-law from his and his wife Alessandra Ferruzzi’s (Idina’s sister, Raul’s wife) point of view. The author, who succeeded him for a short period at the helm of the Ferruzzi group (Arturo, another of Serafino’s sons, died in the last few hours), enters with a straight leg into a discussion that was closed a while ago, but reopened last year last from the Rai docufilm, with Fabrizio Bentivoglio in the role of Gardini.

Gardini’s suicide

A product that this branch of the family did not like due to the “cut” given. Docufiction released, precisely, in 2023, thirty years after that horrendous 1993: Tangentopoli, Gardini’s suicide, the group that is taken from the hands of family members. Sama has no problem quoting and arguing with the deceased for what he believes to be a necessary truth operation. The summary is brutal: Gardini made himself “beautiful” with the capital and guarantees of Ferruzzi, built with the sweat and intuitions of his father-in-law Serafini. An inveterate poker player on the financial tables, convinced that he can win on all fronts. Of course, a glamorous figure (even if constructed in a painstaking manner by the press office, as he has little ability to improvise). Sama himself admits that he has always been fascinated by his brother-in-law, who is fifteen years older. But the “chemistry” goes to the head of the Ravenna native: Enimont, the union between Eni and Montedison, becomes “an obsession, a chimera, an ordeal, his greatest defeat”. And he also put too much effort into the desire to move the center of business from his native Ravenna to Venice, a way to transform the “Feruzzi Group” into the “Gardini Group”, trying to erase the founder’s imprinting as much as possible.

The other major defendant in Sama’s book is Mediobanca, the institution founded by Enrico Cuccia. First he suggests – this is the author’s story – how to restructure the Ferruzzi group to save it, then he wants to take over the “house jewels”. The manager has very clear ideas about it: it was one of the largest expropriations in history. Mediobanca would have exploited the crisis and the debts to take control. For Sama, Fiat was more indebted and bleeding, while a more flourishing Ferruzzi-Montedison was left to die, to be saved at a later time.

The story to tell

But why wouldn’t Mediobanca have saved the second largest Italian group, while it would have guaranteed the survival of others, more indebted and with less cash flow? For Sama, the Ferruzzi group was not part of the elite circles of national politics, nor of the historic families of the Italian establishment. In short, Gardini was a great captain of industry in the first part of the 1980s. Then he got lost along the way and the whole family paid the price. The real leader was Serafino Ferruzzi, capable of establishing his cereal activities in Argentina and the USA and of guessing at all the acquisitions. An entrepreneur who lived for work and did not appear in the media, even when he was Italy’s No. 2 after Agnelli. If there is any Rai screenwriter in sight, this could be the next story to tell.