Carlo Maria Lomartire: Mattei

Carlo Maria Lomartire
Ed. Mondadori
pagg: 366

I have just finished reading Mattei's biography, of which, to be honest, I knew practically nothing, just as I did not know and know nothing of many of our politicians of the last fifty years.
I realize that at school certain subjects have never been treated, but it is not a justification, I should have informed myself.
The biography of Mattei, written by Carlo Maria Lomartire, is a really interesting book, which helps us understand the Italy of today by going through the story of a stubborn man named Enrico Mattei.

Mattei was born in Acqualagna, in the Marche region, the 29 April 1906. The father is marshal of the carabinieri and enjoys a certain fame as he recognized and arrested one of the most famous bandits of the late nineteenth century, the Calabrian Musolino.
In the book Lomartire also tells us the story of this bandit, perhaps only a poor unfortunate, who died in the asylum in the 1956, at the age of eighty.

Mattei was born poor and is certainly not a great scholar. In 1919 the family moved to Matelica where they lived in via Tommaso De Luca, today via Marcello Boldrini.
A few years later Enrico finds work in an iron bed factory, where he deals with painting them, so the working history of the most powerful Italian post-war man begins.
It is a special period, Mattei is young and daredevil, but within a few years he will prove to be a great worker and have a great nose for business.
In the 1927 Enrico Mattei leaves for the military service he will perform at the grenadiers of Sardinia, at Orvieto as a soldier, but only for six months. He is discharged and can return to work full time at the tannery of Matelica of which he was already technical director. He was promoted to plant manager at the age of only twenty-one. In the '29 the collapse of the bags in America causes repercussions all over the world and also in Matelica the work suffers, the tannery closes and Mattei is forced, like many others, to look for work.

He decides to leave for Milan. An acquaintance finds them, Marcello Boldrini, who, although older than Mattei by sixteen and of different social class, becomes his friend and will always remain so. It is Boldrini himself who will educate him politically. In the 30s, Mattei continued to work and soon became a major player in the sale of tanning products, a sector he knew very well. Then in '34 he decided to set up his own business and opened a company specializing in the production and sale of paints, oils, greases and soaps for the tanning industry. And, once again, it achieves success. In a few years he will be able to put aside a huge fortune, which he also makes available to the family.

The war comes. Mattei does not hold back from anything and uses the money he has set aside and all his willpower to help the partisans, becoming himself one of them.
At the end of the war he will succeed in asserting his commitment among the Catholic partisans ... he is one of the founders of the Christian Democratic Party and soon after he will receive a post that will transform him from a successful man to a powerful man.
Immediately after the war, in fact, the need arises to reorganize what remains of Italy and the large state-owned companies, one of which is called Agip.
Mattei receives the task of closing it, a decision taken mainly to please Americans who do not like the interest of the state in business, especially when it comes to oil.
From that moment the story of Mattei becomes the story of Agip first and then of ENI.
The story of Mattei is intertwined from now on with that of the Seven Sisters, the main oil producing companies, with the Italian political life, with deputies, senators, presidents and kings, becomes the history of Italy, until October 1962.

Enrico Mattei uses Agip and L'ENI to influence the political life of a nation, Italy, and then the world. There is certainly no scruples in employing the immense economic availability that Agip and then ENI will give him, influencing all Italian political parties indifferently. Yet there is always something fundamentally admirable in his actions.

On August 20, 1962, in the Corriere della Sera and the New York Times, an article talks about Mattei: "Italy is a country full of paradoxes. Its bureaucracy still includes colonial officials, colonies long lost. . In his bureaucracy there are militant communists and two pretenders to the ancient throne of Byzantium, one of whom earns his living as a clown. But of all the visible anomalies the most curious and significant is the position of Enrico Mattei, head of the trust national fuel, a state official who virtually controls the state.

Mattei is a fascinating man, rich in organizational talent, passionate about fishing with a splendid state of service as a partisan in time of war. Proud and brilliant, he is afflicted by an inferiority complex and hatred of western oil companies, which has resulted in a particular antipathy to the United States and the Atlantic Alliance. 

This seems to me an excellent description of Mattei, which can be completed with what Montanelli wrote: the example of Mattei shows us this spectacle: a government, a parliament and a bureaucracy impotent in front of an official who, being able to be revoked every three years, instead appoints the minister who should control him, imposes his monopoly over those who should fight, deal directly with foreign governments and dictate a foreign policy that often contradicts that of the State [..] Mattei is a very high-profile entrepreneur. He possesses not only all the qualities, but even the defects of the great builder: introversion, lack of human warmth, puritan melancholy, the monomaniacal tendency to concentrate all his faculties on the essential, the almost mystical certainty of a mission to accomplish, the ability to lie by believing in lies and even being moved [..] but by the gigantic amount of money moved by ENI, not a lira ends up in its pockets. About that - continues Montanelli - it would come to add "unfortunately!" , because if this were the case everything would be simplified: we would only have one more thief, among the many that there are. But Mattei is honest. He does not even withdraw his salary because he donates it to charity.

Just before his death, Mattei was supposed to meet Kennedy due to a controversial plane crash.

A book that is really well written and in many ways enlightening, which should be part of every Italian bookstore, to always remember who we are and where we come from.

I thank the author, Carlo Maria Lomartire, for this wonderful book.

Alessandro Rugolo