The outcome of any war is determined by production. The side that produces the most always wins. Since the Industrial Revolution, it is not battles that win wars, but factories. These factories have shaped the modern world. We are all familiar with Volkswagen, Ford, Mitsubishi, but what is less well known is that these car companies have established themselves as war factories. Fiat has an important place among them.
The Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino, or Fiat, may be best known for its small cars, but it is a true industrial giant. With production and partnerships around the world, Fiat is the market leader in Italy and Brazil, the fourth largest car manufacturer in Europe and the eleventh largest in the world.
But like other big Italian capitalist companies, Fiat collaborated with Mussolini’s fascist regime and, during the Second World War, with Nazi Germany. To supply the fascist machine, the company produced various types of equipment, including military vehicles, and armaments.
Giovanni Agnelli, who founded and ran Italy’s first and largest car company, Fiat, always managed to reconcile the interests of entrepreneurs, workers and the state, and to leave his successors a strong and growing industry.
Fiat’s beginnings
The story of the Italian car manufacturer began in industrial Turin in 1899, where Giovanni Agnelli, a 33-year-old former cavalry officer, was looking for a new career. Born in 1866 in Villar Perosi, a small town in the Piedmont region at the foot of the Italian Alps, Agnelli came from a powerful landowning family whose standard of living was at the level of Italian high society. He studied at the Collegio San Giuseppe in Turin and, after graduating, enrolled at the military academy in Modena, thus embarking on the traditional path reserved for young men from wealthy families.
After leaving the army in 1893, where he had served as an officer in the cavalry, he returned to Villar Perosa with his wife and two small children, where he ran the family business and was appointed mayor in 1895, almost a tradition, since his father and grandfather had already been mayors.
It was at this time that Giovanni Agnelli, who had become increasingly interested in the mechanics and construction of cars, first heard of a new invention made in Germany called the “horseless carriage”. A businessman with a flair for engineering, he began to think of building one himself. Sensing an opportunity to use his engineering and entrepreneurial skills, he joined a group of investors and co-founded Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino in 1899. The company later adopted a shortened version of this name and became known as Fiat.
Fiat opened its first factory in 1900, with 35 employees. It was slow going at first, producing 24 cars, and many partners lost interest. Car manufacturing was still a precarious business and was not considered a stable industry for the future. The car was a luxury that only the wealthiest could afford. But Agnelli was not discouraged because he had a vision.
Although Giovanni Agnelli was the youngest of the three founders and served as secretary to the board of directors, he quickly gained a prominent position among the original investors and became the company’s CEO in 1902.
Production figures began to soar. Fiat was known from the start for the talent and creativity of its engineering staff and by 1903 it was already making a small profit, producing 135 cars. Production also expanded in more and more directions: trucks, trams and buses were also produced under the Fiat brand.
However, there were conflicts between shareholders and in autumn 1904 the chief financier, Emanuel Cacherano di Bricherasio, announced that he wanted to check the documents and expose the abuses and intrigues he was convinced of. But he was unable to carry out his plan, as he died suddenly in mysterious circumstances and no investigation was ever carried out by the authorities.
By 1906, production had risen to 1149 cars of seven different models.
Agnelli, who had shown ambition and careerism, managed to oust the remaining founders in the same year by a complex game of shareholders and banks. After newspapers exposed the fraud against the expelled shareholders, the Turin police indicted him and other executives in 1908 for “illegal coalition, stock market manipulation and alteration of the company’s balance sheets”. According to the investigators, Agnelli put the company into liquidation, then immediately re-founded it without the original shareholders, took full control and ascended to the throne of Fiat.
The Piedmontese industrialist was acquitted in a trial that took place in a climate of strong political manoeuvring, under the protection of Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti and pressure from the Freemasons, “because a prosecution against Agnelli would have had negative consequences for the nascent national industry”.
In the Turin car factory there was strict discipline: the workers and engineering staff were completely under Agnelli’s authority. As a former soldier, Agnelli did not tolerate the slightest disobedience or deviation from his demands. But the firm and authoritarian management style and the output quality control made it possible to produce highly reliable cars.
A revolutionary assembly line
The high production volumes for the time whetted Agnelli’s appetite and his company began to expand in Europe. He also wanted to penetrate the American market.
Agnelli visited the US several times and met another car entrepreneur, Henry Ford. He saw a future in Ford’s factory, which was a model of progress and made cars for the masses. At that time, cars were laboriously assembled by hand and work was slow and productivity was poor. But Ford categorised the tasks on the assembly line and revolutionised the way things were done.
Initially, the production of a car started with a team of engineers, who followed the vehicle through every stage of production, from the chassis, bodywork and engine. They were all experts at their job, able to produce every element in the manufacturing process. They produced a vehicle that was superb and beautiful to look at, but very expensive. When they moved to the assembly line, everything changed completely.
The assembly line meant that each element of production was divided into a series of stages, and in each stage a group of skilled people could do a single task. Once that task was completed, the vehicle was sent to the next stage of production, and they worked on the next vehicle that came to them. Ford’s way of working, where each stage continued as an endless linear process from start to finish, quickly became the standard of the automotive industry.
Agnelli’s company grew and soon reached the US market. In 1908, the Fiat Automobile Company was founded in the USA.
Under Agnelli’s leadership, Fiat had become the largest car manufacturer in Italy by 1910, and the company’s racing success was marked by Fiat winning every international race, including the legendary Indianapolis 500 mile race, adding to its fame and reputation.
At the end of 1912, using Ford’s new methods, Fiat switched from elite and racing cars to production cars, built its first people’s car, the Tipo Zero, and made a fortune.
Agnelli was not only a shrewd businessman, but also a shrewd politician. He was a great judge of where the political wind was turning, and this paid off enormously throughout his career. He was aware that the state could prevent the rise of smaller competitors who threatened to undermine the dominant position.
One of his first political friends was the Liberal leader and Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti. He befriended him because he needed political power to run a big business. So he won a number of war contracts and during the First World War Fiat prospered and made huge profits. The product range was extended to trucks and delivered to the Italian army. At the same time, Fiat had to turn all its factories to supplying the Allies – producing aircraft, engines, machine guns, trucks and ambulances.
The Turin riots
In 1915, the Italian government set up the Mobilitazione Industrialei, MI (Industrial Mobilisation), and under their rules all workers were placed under the control of the army. In fact, the growing military needs led to the significant growth of companies belonging to the iron and steel, automotive, mechanical-metallurgical and chemical sectors, including Fiat, which created a “new working class”, unskilled, inexperienced and nanoparented among peasants, craftsmen, women and adolescents.
Workers were not allowed to strike, resign or change jobs without the permission of the MI regional committee, otherwise they would be assimilated to deserters. Disciplinary sanctions were toughened and included fines, dismissals, reporting to military courts and sending strikers to the front. During the war years, the working week was extended to 75 hours, almost double the normal working week today, holidays were abolished and wages were drastically reduced.
Conditions in factories were difficult and industrial accidents were twice as frequent as in the pre-war period due to reduced safeguards and exhaustion. The deterioration in employment conditions and living standards led to discontent, and this began to spread rapidly among the workers in the winter of 1916.
The echoes of the Russian Revolution raised the hopes of the working class, especially in Turin, where the militant proletariat was concentrated. From March 1917, sporadic strikes and demonstrations took place in the metal and textile industries. In August 1917, discontent, hunger and anti-war motives provoked uprisings and strikes in Turin, which required the harsh intervention of the police forces.
One morning, 80 local bakeries put up a sign saying that there was no bread because of a shortage of flour. Women saw that bakers were continuing to bake luxury products for the so-called ‘burgeoisie’, but they could not get bread, so they went with their children to the town hall and began to protest.
This was the spark that ignited the violent riots on 21 August 1917. In Turin, there was spontaneous resistance to the shortage of bread, but the protest immediately turned into a general demonstration against the war. After two days, a general strike was called, paralysing the city. While the government defended the centre with the army, the working class, led by women’s processions, organised the occupation of all the peripheral areas. Shops, barracks and churches were looted and supplies distributed among the crowds.
The riots were followed by a solidarity strike of 2000 railway workers, joined by more and more workers, including from the Fiat factory, leading to a veritable mini-revolution in Turin, known as the “Turin Uprising”. Protesters threw home-made bombs and clashed with the police and the army, who opened fire on people.
The riots were put down after a week and the workers’ revolt failed, mainly because of a lack of unity, as there was no organisation capable of directing the forces and giving them a programme. The final result of the Turin uprising was the death of some 50 rioters, with another 800 wounded. 1500 workers were sent to the front as punishment, which was almost a death sentence, because the conditions at the front were appalling.
As the First World War drew to a close, Turin was a bubbling cauldron of resentment just waiting to burst.
The Red Bicentenary
Although Italy was the victor of the First World War, it emerged from it economically devastated. The pressure of war production led to shortages and labour unrest. The ruling liberalism was only interested in economic profit, forgetting the promised basic rights of citizens. In such an environment, radical ideas began to emerge, in particular communism on the one hand and fascism on the other.
In Russia, Lenin lit the red litmus paper. The Russian Revolution was successful, strikes took place in England and the Weimar Republic was born in Germany. All over Europe, the power of communism was growing and industrialists and politicians were increasingly worried that this powder keg was going to explode into a full-blown revolution.
Finally, in 1919, the boil finally broke and Italy was engulfed in social unrest. The two-year-long “Red Period” (Biennio Rosso), a period of intense social conflict that paralysed the Italian economy, began. A huge strike wave swept across Italy, marked by a working class struggle inspired by Soviet ideals.
In April 1920, metalworkers in Turin, especially in the Fiat factories, went on strike demanding recognition of their “workers’ councils”, which they saw as the model of a new democratically controlled economy running the industrial plants. Because they were refused, some 400,000 armed metalworkers and 100,000 other workers in the “industrial triangle” in north-west Italy occupied 185 factories.
When the workers occupied the Fiat factory in Turin and raised the red communist flag, Giovanni Agnelli reacted by leaving the company, retiring to private life and allowing the workers to try to run the factory. Within a very short time, three thousand of them gathered outside his office and asked him to take back the reins of the company – and he did.
The general strike that swept Italy proved to be a failure after two years and led to the rise of fascist movements, especially that led by Benito Mussolini.
The alliance between Agnelli and Mussolini
The revolutionary unrest after the First World War forced Agnelli to choose between increasingly diverse political allies. Fear of a Russian-style popular uprising dictated that the aristocracy and industrialists converged with the nationalist fascist party. When his liberal friend Giolliti refused his request to use the army to crush a communist strike in Fiat’s factories, Agnelli turned to a former militant socialist who had indignantly split from his party – a young journalist named Benito Mussolini.
Mussolini was a radical journalist who had started his career as a fervent socialist, but who had eventually acquired more nationalist influences. He turned socialism and some of its ideas into his own form of fervent Italian nationalism.
Agnelli found in it the perfect tool to secure Fiat’s future. Mussolini was for him the man who would help him control Giolitti and the trade unions, so he decided to support him.
Over the next few years, emboldened fascists terrorised workers, broke strikes and repressed opponents. Whole cities fell under their control, although Mussolini never dared to take Turin by force. It was Agnelli’s personal fiefdom. Like most industrialists, Agnelli was not ideological and considered himself essentially apolitical. He never really fully embraced fascism and never publicly supported it. He documentedly called on Mussolini to stop the violence in the provinces and tried to keep it short.
But in October 1922 that leash was broken. At the Fascist Party conference in Naples, Mussolini made an inflammatory speech calling on the fascists to seize power. Fuelled by his speech, thousands of fascists marched from Naples to Rome. The one-week march on Rome, during which the fascists seized many barracks and other important institutions around the country, ended on 29 October 1922 when King Victor Emmanuel III, fearing civil war with the fascists, appointed Mussolini Prime Minister.
In reality, the March on Rome was not a coup d’état, but a transfer of power to end a decade of unrest that had spread like a cancer from the factories of Turin throughout Italy. Mussolini did not take power, it was given to him by the leading Italian industrialists, who saw him as a shield against unrest. They were worried about discontent and strikes in the factories, and Mussolini was the one who could keep order and maintain production. Leading among them was Giovanni Agnelli, the owner of Fiat.
The mutually beneficial relationship between the shrewd industrialist and Mussolini began in 1923 with Agnelli’s appointment as Senator for life. Fascism desperately needed Agnelli to consolidate its prestige and confirm its mystique of progress. Agnelli agreed to political control, but decided to support Mussolini as long as he did not interfere too much in his business interests, as he wanted to protect his monopolistic aspirations and maintain as much independence as possible in the management of Fiat.
He claimed to be on the side of the government, but did not say that it did not matter what kind of government it was. In this sense, the Agnelli plan was a great success, and this pragmatic approach paid off handsomely for him in the years to come and during the war.
In May 1923, Giovanni Agnelli inaugurated the new Fiat car factory in the Turin suburb of Lingotto, built exclusively for the production and testing of cars. The famous factory was the largest in Europe at the time and featured a unique five-storey assembly line, culminating in a futuristic test platform on the roof of the building. For decades, it became a symbol of the automotive industry in Italy.
The assembly line rose to the floors, where the car was assembled piece by piece, and the finished car appeared on the roof, where there was a magnificent test track for checking out the vehicles. It was 400 metres long and had parabolic ramps that were raised and curved, so they could really race there. It could take speeds of up to 90 kilometres per hour, which was a remarkable speed at that time. It was the first time that someone had built something like that, and the Lingotto factory symbolised the age of speed, the age of modernity and the age of fascism. It made Italy great again.
Mussolini’s seizure of power benefited Agnelli greatly. He wanted Italy to be a superpower, but it did not have the infrastructure to do so, apart from a few companies like Fiat. Agnelli, by supporting Mussolini, got preferential contracts. When Ford tried to penetrate the Italian market, Mussolini, through a series of laws, banned the production of foreign cars in Italy, thus giving Fiat a protected market.
In 1930, Benito Mussolini called Senator Giovanni Agnelli to inform him of the “urgent need” to motorise Italians with an economical car costing no more than 5 000 lire, an affordable price for the working class at the time.
Fiat was not in a position to produce a car at that price during the first development period, and the prospects were not very encouraging. But then the production was entrusted to a young engineer, Dante Giacosa, who made the dream of Fiat’s management come true. In 1934, the first working prototype car left the Turin factory.
The Fiat 500 “Topolino” quickly endeared itself to the Italians as it was economical, somewhat robust and simple, but very modern. It became one of the most iconic cars of its era because it looked to the future, not the past. Under the fascists, Fiat tripled its profits and doubled its workforce.
In the ultra-modern fascist future of Mussolini’s Italy, Fiat cars naturally needed a road, a motorway, and a motorway network was built in northern Italy. It was the world’s first motorway and a concrete symbol of Italy’s transition from backwardness and humiliation to a new glory.
But Fiat and the fascists did not confine themselves to roads, and in 1931 Fiat built Italy’s first liquid-fuelled train. The Littorina was a revolution, as steam locomotives were no longer needed to pull the wagons, as they had their own motive power.
Fifteen metres long, with 48 seats and a top speed of 110 kilometres per hour, Fiat’s Littorina was another revolution in design. Its appearance brought an end to the age of steam. Now these self-propelled trains could take you anywhere in Italy, to the mountains, Sardinia or Sicily. Above all, they have made it possible for ordinary Italians to travel as nothing has ever done before.
Despite the obvious advantage, Agnelli’s alliance with the Fascists was never more than a marriage of convenience. Agnelli did not join the Fascist Party until 1932, ten years after Mussolini’s rise to power. He was never a vocal supporter of the fascist regime, because he was not convinced by their economic policies. He turned out to be right, because Mussolini’s grand plans hid a weak economy with half the growth of the Liberals.
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Mirafiori offended Mussolini
Agnelli said he would work with the government, but only as long as it helped Fiat. He was a pragmatist and his attitude was reflected in many ways by his workers. To keep up with growing demand, in 1939 he opened an even bigger factory in Turin’s Mirafiori district. Spread over two million square metres, with 20 kilometres of tracks and 11 kilometres of underground roads, Fiat’s newest factory was a city in a small town. Mussolini decided that the inauguration would be a grand ceremony, with him, the ghost, at the centre.
The opening of the Mirafiori factory was another example of how, as so often in Mussolini’s career, the attempt at a grand ceremony turned into a farce. Mussolini was basking in the glory of opening the largest car factory in Europe, but there were problems in the sunny skies.
Fiat’s management organised the day by summoning tens of thousands of workers to the front of the factory and erecting a stage to celebrate the fascist regime. But the ceremony literally petered out. Mussolini was much late, and the workers, who waited for him in the rain for two hours, received him with almost complete indifference. During his speech, he did not receive enough applause from the audience, so he left the ceremony early and stormed off, offended.
The episode reveals the discontent of the workers of the time, who were disillusioned by the broken promises of the regime and dissatisfied by the rising prices and the restrictions on consumption imposed by the subsistence economic policy.
The incident upset Mussolini very much and he never returned to Turin. By “All Piedmontese are pigs!” he was referring to the working class in Turin, where anti-fascism was widespread, but also to the top leadership of Fiat, for he had learned that the calculating Agnelli had referred to the leadership of the National Fascist Party as “those cretins from Rome”.
Some major state business was therefore awarded to other companies, but relations between Fiat and Mussolini deteriorated, mainly because of the burden of taxes caused by the fascist government’s war ambitions.
But Agnelli was more concerned about Mussolini’s foreign policy and his dangerous flirtation with Hitler’s Nazi party. Mussolini imagined that Italy was a superpower, always ready for war, but Italian industrialists were increasingly aware that this was not true. Supporting Hitler meant alienating the rich markets of the leading European democracies, especially Britain and France.
Italian businessmen had no interest in dealing with their largest source of capital outside Italy. The partnership between Mussolini and Hitler was not ideal and ultimately brought the downfall of both Mussolini and Agnelli. For this, the world had to go to war once more.
The fatal flaw of the fascist regime
The Italians did no better in the Second World War than they did in the First. Mussolini allied himself with Hitler, which seemed a masterstroke in 1939. He was already disillusioned with the British and the French, and Hitler was tempting him to rule Europe together.
Japan occupied Chinese Manchuria, Hitler occupied Czechoslovakia and Poland. Fascism was on the rise, but first impressions can be deceptive.
Yet every demagogue in history began to believe in himself, and Mussolini is a typical example of this self-delusion. He started out as a fairly pragmatic and sober politician, but by the mid-1930s he was apparently believing his own propaganda that he was going to found a new Roman Empire. This is the fateful moment when Mussolini lost touch with reality and began to make serious mistakes.
This became extremely noticeable in the transport sector when Agnelli’s Fiat was unable to provide the necessary trucks because of the economic ideology of fascism. In fact, victory in the Second World War was decided by the use of trucks, not by the number of tanks and aircraft. You needed trucks to carry supplies, because modern armies could not carry them on horseback and needed trucks.
Agnelli wanted to build a factory in Mirafiori because he needed it to supply Mussolini with trucks for his military adventures. He could not do this with the resources he had. Despite the increased supply, the state-controlled economy could not keep up with demand and Mussolini had to turn to American free enterprise. To Agnelli’s shame, Mussolini eventually turned to a consortium of Italian companies, which was only a front for the Ford Corporation.
Fiat’s failure exposed a fatal flaw in the fascist regime. The key economic ideology of the fascists in Italy was corporatism. This idea rejects capitalism with free market competition and divides the economy into sectors. The big problem is that politicians and bureaucrats are guided in important economic decisions by political objectives, which are often short-term, and this is disastrous for any practical business.
But Fiat, as always, adapted, and when the world conflict began, it also started producing tanks and other armoured vehicles, as well as newly designed trucks that became the Italian standard for all battlefields. Not only did it supply vehicles to the Italians in North Africa, but also to the Japanese in Manchuria, to Franco’s forces in Spain and even to China. It also supported the Luftwaffe, and one in every 20 aircraft that flew over Britain during the Battle of Britain was Italian.
Italy’s treason infuriates Hitler
As the war continued into 1943, fortune turned its back on Mussolini. The catalyst for this change was once again the Fiat workers in Turin.
In 1943, Italian factories came within range of the Allied planes that brought the war to their doorstep. The Allies’ fierce attacks had a devastating impact on the factory workers. At Mirafiori, they stopped work in protest because they did not get their danger allowance for the bombing of Turin. Eight hundred workers downed tools and went home to avoid the bombs. This spread to a general strike throughout Italy. 100,000 workers went on strike. The workers began to blame Mussolini for everything that went wrong.
Fiat and other war factories were in a worsening situation as the heavy bombing continued and a fifth of the workforce left the factories. As Fiat was by far Italy’s largest employer, Fiat workers were in an even worse position than others. Food shortages were also catastrophic. It is estimated that Italian workers lost an average of 17 kilograms of weight, getting less than 1 000 calories a day, and so weakened they could not work, especially not in the factory.
By 1943, support for fascism had evaporated. Advisers told Mussolini that the population blamed the regime for the bombing, not the enemy.
The Allied invasion and civil unrest finally led to Mussolini’s ouster in July 1943, and Italy surrendered shortly afterwards. But Hitler had other ideas. Furious at being stabbed in the back by the Allies, he ordered Colonel Otto Skorzceny and his special forces to launch an extraordinarily daring attack to rescue Mussolini, and then installed him as leader of the Northern Italian Republic.
Fiat and Turin were now occupied by the Nazis. This was quite different from the Mussolini regime. When the workers of Turin protested against this occupation, the SS general who was now in command, Otto Zimmermann, reacted quite differently. He ordered them to fire on the strikers. The leaders were shot and thousands of others were sent to labour camps in Germany.
Agnelli was in an increasingly dangerous position. He was no longer autonomous in the German war economy and he no longer decided what to produce for the Italian army. He found himself in a quandary, since he was officially a member of the Fascist Party and could not criticise the regime. Fiat’s war factories were at the whims of the Third Reich, and Agnelli was nothing more than a puppet; his industrial empire had been wrested from his hands. To survive, Fiat had to take the greatest risks. He saw where the wind was turning, so he decided to join the resistance.
Agnelli is playing a dangerous game
The Italian resistance fighters, known as partisans, stood up to the occupying forces in a conflict that became known as the Italian War of Liberation. Agnelli and his right-hand man Vittorio Valletta began to play a very dangerous double game. At first sight, Fiat was a loyal supporter of the fascist regime, supplying tanks, trucks and aircraft engines to the Germans.
Behind the scenes, however, he was supporting someone else, as he began to supply the partisans with arms and to give the Americans and the British vital intelligence, not so much because he liked the Allies and wanted them to win, but to prepare for the post-war period he wisely expected.
The plan had two objectives, to save his head and to retain control of Fiat and the money. The double game was very dangerous and if the Germans found out about it, it could have ended badly for Agnelli and Fiat. But if Agnelli had not cooperated with the Allies, the risk would probably have been even greater.
When the war ended in 1945, the risk paid off. In May 1945, Valletta was tried for collaboration with the Nazis. He was fully prepared, because he had always been a master of detail. He showed details of how much money Agnelli, the company and he had given to the Italian resistance in 1943 and afterwards. This won the Allies over to his side.
In July 1946, he was reinstated as head of Fiat and the company was financed to keep it going. Giovanni Agnelli was not so lucky. Valletta was able to get rid of its ties with the fascists, but it was a little more difficult for him because he was ambivalent. No one has forgotten how closely he was linked to Mussolini after 1922. He was put under house arrest and died there on 16 December 1945, still very much tainted by his collaboration with the Duce.
He was posthumously acquitted of collaboration with the fascist regime, because anti-fascists themselves believed that Agnelli’s political adherence to fascism was merely a result of necessity, not ideological affiliation.
The transition to a new era
Now Valletta had to preserve Agnelli’s legacy. He more than justified the trust and diverted Fiat’s wartime factories back into car production. His tenure was a great success, as Fiat boomed in the 1950s and produced some of the most iconic cars of the century.
His masterstroke was the reintroduction of the Fiat 500, the iconic Cinquecento. It is one of Fiat’s most famous cars, an original little design that became an instant classic. It was followed by the Fiat 600, the licence model for the Yugoslav car from Kragujevac, the Zastava 600 – the iconic and much-loved ficho or ficko. (Fičo is not a diminutive of Fiat, but was the name of a character in a comic strip published in the Borba newspaper in the late 1950s – Fića the Courier.)
In 1957, barely twelve years after the end of the war, Fiat had increased production tenfold and was once again one of Italy’s largest employers.
Agnelli’s grandson, Gianni Agnelli, took over the business in 1966 and once again developed Fiat into a force within Italy. For decades afterwards, industrial Italy was led by the Agnelli family monarchy, which established itself by becoming an institution. For a simple reason: because they were the best and the brightest. Skilful, sometimes cynical, but it was precisely because of this behaviour, elevated to virtue, that they triumphed in the Darwinist capitalist selection.
(TEXT IN BOX AS A POINT OF INTEREST)
The Fiat that failed to save Mussolini
Benito Mussolini is known to have enjoyed many of the best things in life. He gave his mistress Clara Petacci a sleek black Fiat two-door Berlinetta coupe, which played an important role in a decisive moment in 20th century history.
On 28 April 1945, just before the great Allied offensive, Mussolini and his lover Clara Petacci tried to escape in a Fiat coupe. As they and their entourage of 16 were heading for the Chiavenna airstrip, where a plane was waiting to take them to neutral Switzerland, they were captured by Italian partisans and executed.
The Resistance pushed their car, which they considered a symbol of fascism, into Lake Garda, but the infamous coupe was later retrieved from its watery grave and smuggled into Switzerland on a railway carriage under piles of hay.
After almost half a century in Switzerland, the elegant berlinetta, which could not help the duke and his mistress escape the resistance fighters but actually drove them to their deaths, was sold to an unknown American collector for more than a hundred thousand dollars.
In February 2015, Mussolini’s car was auctioned again and, according to some reports, sold for around two million euros.
