Giovanni Alberto Agnelli

Giovanni Alberto Agnelli (19 April 1964 – 13 December 1997), colloquially known as Giovannino Agnelli, was an Italian businessman and member of the Agnelli family, an Italian industrial dynasty associated with Fiat S.p.A. Agnelli's father was politician and industrialist Umberto Agnelli; his uncle was Fiat head Gianni Agnelli. Prior to his 1997 death at age 33, he was the heir apparent and designated future chairman of the Fiat Group. Agnelli's reputation among the Italian public was comparable to that of John F. Kennedy Jr. in the United States; in the words of Alan Friedman, he was "rich, strikingly handsome, always smiling and the leading voice of his generation." the young Agnelli followed his mother to the United States where he attended The McCallie School in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Agnelli enrolled at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, as a member of the class of 1986; his thesis was about the Middle East, and he graduated in international relations. In the words of Lee Marshall, Agnelli was often tipped as "Europe's most eligible bachelor" even though in reality he had "little interest in the playboy lifestyle".

After university, Agnelli began his military service as a Carabiniere-paratrooper. On 21 April 1986, he joined the Tuscania battalion of the Carabinieri; he remained in the ranks, unable to take the reserve officer course because the Italian state did not recognize his United States qualification. The same year, he appeared in their advertising campaign aimed at relaunching Tuscania under the name of Carabiniere Giovanni.

Agnelli joined Piaggio in 1987. In 1993, Agnelli became president of the company, which he successfully turned around and built into a European market leader.

Business policy Groomed to be the heir of Fiat, he was appointed president of the subsidiary Piaggio on 25 February 1993. On 15 November 1993, he entered the board of directors of Piaggio. He said: "People are the source of our strength. They are the resource and intelligence of the organization ... Involvement at every level, teamwork, sharing of objectives are necessary for the realization of our mission."

On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Vespa on 19 September 1996, Agnelli said: "The function of industry is not only or even mainly that of profit. The aim is to improve the quality of life by making products and services available." He was interested in politics and was an interlocutor of many politicians, including one of the founders of Italy's Democratic Party in 2007, Walter Veltroni, thanks to his innovative ideas and his attention to ethics and people's well-being. He is remembered as an enlightened entrepreneur engaged in public life, convinced that doing business meant not only creating income but also improving the life of the community. He often expressed his views on financial matters, such as the gap between the net salary and the gross salary, and the Italian tax law. In his entrepreneurial activity, he was among the first to leave space for the values of the company, to protect them and put them first, which was considered ahead of the times, and projecting the family business towards a socially sustainable development. He was one of the first entrepreneurs to argue that, in order to continue growing, a company must promote the development of the context in which it is inserted, therefore of the territory and the local community, with a series of targeted investments and relationships with the surrounding realities. his mother was the heiress of motorcycle company Piaggio, which was later acquired by the Agnellis. When his parents divorced in 1974, her mother took the young Agnelli with her to Atlanta, Georgia, US where she owned a dog farm. The parents remarried the same year: his father to Donna Allegra Caracciolo, cousin of Marella Agnelli (born Donna Marella Caracciolo di Castagneto and wife of Gianni Agnelli), and his mother to a duke, Uberto Visconti di Modrone, in turn a relative of Marella Agnelli and Allegra Caracciolo. After both his parents remarried, he had several half-siblings: on his father's side, he had one brother and sister, Andrea Agnelli (born 1975) and Anna Agnelli (born 1977), while on his mother's side he had a sister, Chiara Visconti di Modrone. In 1996, Agnelli married Frances Avery Howe, an Anglo-American architect whom he met when they were both students at Brown University.

Agnelli and his wife had a child, who was born in September 1997. By this time, Agnelli was already experiencing advanced illness from a rare form of stomach cancer. He was treated in specialized centers in the United States. He died in the villa della Mandria, Turin, on 13 December 1997. Among others, Juventus FC, the association football club owned by the Agnelli family of which he was a supporter, were mourning; then-Juventus player Filippo Inzaghi cried during the minute of silence before the club's first Serie A match since Agnelli's death. In the words of Alan Friedman, Agnelli's death was a "setback for millions of Italians who saw him as a symbol of generational change, as a spokesman for the need to reform Italy's clubby and oligarchic system of capitalism and as an ardent supporter of political reforms."