Gianni Agnelli

Agnelli was born in Turin; he maintained strong ties with the village of Villar Perosa, near Turin in the Piedmont region, of which he served as mayor until 1980. His father was the prominent Italian industrialist Edoardo Agnelli. His maternal grandmother was American; his mother was Princess Virginia Bourbon del Monte, daughter of Carlo, 4th Prince of San Faustino, head of a noble family established in Perugia, who was married with the American heiress Jane Allen Campbell. Agnelli was named after his grandfather Giovanni Agnelli, the founder of the Italian car manufacturer Fiat. At the age of 14, his father was killed in a plane crash, and he was raised by his grandfather, who died on 16 December 1945, fifteen days after Agnelli's mother, Virginia, died in a car crash.

Known as Gianni to differentiate from his grandfather, with whom he shared his first name, he inherited the command of Fiat and the Agnelli family assets in general in 1966, following a period in which Fiat was temporarily ruled by Vittorio Valletta while he was learning how his family's company worked. Agnelli raised Fiat to become the most important company in Italy, and one of the major car-builders of Europe, amid the Italian economic miracle. He was considered the king of Italian business from the 1960s to the 1980s. He also developed an accessory business, with minor companies, such as Fiat Velivoli, operating in the military industry.

Agnelli was educated at Pinerolo Cavalry Academy, and studied law at the University of Turin, although he never practised law. He joined a tank regiment in June 1940 when Italy entered World War II on the side of the Axis powers. He fought on the Eastern Front, being wounded twice. He also served in a Fiat-built armoured-car division during the North African campaign, for which he received the War Cross of Military Valor. After the armistice of Cassibile, Agnelli became a liaison officer with the occupying American troops due to his fluency in English. His grandfather, who had manufactured vehicles for the Axis powers during the war, was forced to retire from Fiat but named Valletta to be his successor. His grandfather died, leaving him head of the family, but Valletta running the company. After the pre-war Topolino, Italy's first inexpensive mass-produced car, Fiat in the mid-fifties made a bestseller with the Fiat 600.

Prior to his marriage on 19 November 1953 to Marella Caracciolo dei Principi di Castagneto, a half-American, half-Neapolitan noblewoman who made a small but significant name as a fabric designer and a bigger name as a tastemaker, Agnelli was a noted playboy whose mistresses included actresses, such Anita Ekberg, Rita Hayworth, Linda Christian, Danielle Darrieux, the socialite Pamela Harriman, and Jackie Kennedy. Although Agnelli continued to be involved with other women during his marriage, including Ekberg and the fashion designer Jackie Rogers, the Agnellis remained married until his death of prostate cancer in 2003 at the age of 81.

For most of his life, Agnelli was considered to be a man of exquisite taste. In 2002, he left his paintings to the city of Turin, which established the Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli. His only son, Edoardo Agnelli, was born in New York City on 9 June 1954, seven months after the couple's wedding at the Château d'Osthoffen in France. He gave up trying to groom him to take over Fiat, seeing how the boy was more interested in mysticism than making cars; his son studied religion at Princeton University and took part in a world day of prayer in Assisi. His son, who seemed burdened by the mantle of his surname, committed suicide on 15 November 2000 by jumping off a bridge near Turin; Agnelli joined police at the scene. The Agnellis had one daughter, Countess Margherita Agnelli de Pahlen. She is the mother of John Elkann, Lapo Elkann, and Ginevra Elkann. She has five other children from her second marriage to Count Serge de Pahlen: Maria de Pahlen, Peter de Pahlen, Anna de Pahlen, and Tatiana de Pahlen. Into the 2020s, the de Pahlens remain involved in a dispute with the Elkanns over Agnelli's inheritance.

Agnelli stepped down in 1996 but stayed on as Fiat's honorary chairman until his death. Giovanni Alberto Agnelli, the son of Gianni's younger brother, Umberto Agnelli, died of a rare form of cancer in 1997 at age 33 while he was being groomed by his uncle to head the Fiat Group. John Elkann, the son of Gianni and Marella's daughter, Margherita, was expected to take over Fiat after Gianni's death. Instead, Umberto became chairman, taking over from Paolo Fresco. While Fresco had diversified the Fiat Group's holdings, Umberto refocused its activities on its auto and mechanics division. He then brought in Giuseppe Morchio to mastermind a rescue strategy for the company. Morchio was expected to continue to run the Fiat Group as it attempted to claw its way out of its latest financial crisis.

Upon Umberto's death, Ferrari chairman Luca Cordero di Montezemolo was named Fiat chairman, with Elkann as vice chairman; Morchio immediately offered his resignation. His successor was Sergio Marchionne, an expert of reorganisation who between 2002 and 2004 led the Swiss certification company Societé Générale de Surveillance; Elkann played a key role when he brought Marchionne to Fiat. Agnelli died in 2003 of prostate cancer at age 81 in Turin. Fiat-owned Scuderia Ferrari named their 2003 Formula One contender, the F2003-GA, in tribute to Agnelli. Juventus and the Italian Football Federation were also in mourning over his death. In 2021, to celebrate the centenary of Agnelli's birth, a special postage stamp was issued.

Politically, Agnelli did not join any party and remained an independent politician; nonetheless, he was close to the Italian Republican Party (PRI), and was described as the Republican monarch of the 20th century. He had amicable relations with the Italian Democratic Socialist Party (PSDI) and Italian Socialist Party (PSI) leaders Giuseppe Saragat and Sandro Pertini, respectively, as well as with Francesco Cossiga of Christian Democracy (DC) and Carlo Azeglio Ciampi. Despite their political differences and conflicts like the Marcia dei quarantamila in 1980, he also had relatively amicable relations with the Italian Communist Party (PCI), particularly during the leadership of Enrico Berlinguer; in 2013, Giorgio Napolitano, former PCI member and then president of Italy, described it as "sincere cordiality and sympathy". Several notable PCI leaders, such as Palmiro Togliatti, Luciano Lama, and Berlinguer, and allegedly Antonio Gramsci, were supporters of Agnelli's Juventus.

Like other family members, such as his grandfather, Agnelli sought to create a non-ideological, centrist political formation of Atlanticist and pro-European persuasion that sought a modernising, internationalist capitalism in contrast to the left and opposed to the populist, nationalist, or fascist right. He received his first public assignment in 1961 when, on the occasion of the celebrations for the first centenary of the unification of Italy, he was appointed president of the Expo 61. In the 1970s, there were talks of forming a secular bloc between the Italian Liberal Party, PSDI, and PRI, and take over the place of the DC. Ahead of the 1976 Italian general election, then PRI secretary Ugo La Malfa offered Agnelli a candidacy on the party lists; in turn, Agnelli offered his disponibility to be the Ambassador of the Italian Republic to the United States. The DC was ultimately able to not only have Agnelli retire his PRI candidacy, which could have cost them about one million votes, by raising the prospect of economic retaliations for Fiat but also convinced Umberto Agnelli, his younger brother, to join the DC. He turned down the invite by then president Oscar Luigi Scalfaro to become Prime Minister of Italy after Ciampi.

In 1991, Agnelli was appointed senator for life by Cossiga, then president of the Italian Republic. He joined the For the Autonomies group and was admitted to the Defence Commission of the Senate. In 1994, he was among the three life senators (together with Giovanni Leone and Cossiga) to vote their confidence in the Berlusconi I Cabinet; it was the first time in the history of Italy that life senators were decisive for the confidence in an executive. When Berlusconi was about to enter politics, he said: "If he wins, an entrepreneur will have won. If he loses, Berlusconi will have lost." When the Prodi I Cabinet fell in 1998 and Massimo D'Alema was appointed Prime Minister of Italy and became the first post-Communist to hold the office of a NATO country, as well as Italy's only post-Communist prime minister, his vote in favour of confidence caused a sensation. He told the press that "today in Italy a left-wing government is the only one that can make right-wing policies."