Enzo Ferrari

WARTIME

In terms of business success, Mr Ferrari and his Auto-Avio Costruzioni venture would have ‘a good war’. His labour force in Modena mushroomed over the next two years, surpassing 100, mostly cramped into the old Scuderia premises at Viale Trento e Trieste 11 in Modena. The company earned a fine reputation for precision engineering of particularly high quality.

While Ferrari, Laura and young Dino’s home remained the first-floor apartment above the workshops in the Viale Trento e Trieste, just around the corner on the Largo Garibaldi square he also acquired a large apartment building, the Palazzo dei Cento Caproni, initially as a rental property. His relationship with Laura remained often combative, but he found consolation with a quiet, attractive, wholesomely discreet local girl he had first noticed as early as 1924, when she was only 14. Five years later he met her again when she was working as a secretary for Carrozzeria Orlandi, the local coachbuilder that had helped Ferrari by buying a few assets from his collapsed Carrozzeria Emilia firm, and who would later body the Scuderia Ferrari’s trucks.

Lina Lardi degli Aleardi was daughter of a leading Modena family. She became Enzo Ferrari’s long-term mistress at a time when not only his celebrity was well-known amongst local society, but also what some regarded as his scandalous private reputation. But the deep bond that then developed between them salved the initially fierce opposition of her family. Enzo Ferrari won them both round. Then a respectable blanket of secrecy was drawn around their relationship, and Ferrari would always sustain and protect the form of marriage he had left with Laura.

Meanwhile, Enrico Nardi introduced Mr Ferrari to a machine-tool dealer he knew from Turin, Corrado Gatti, who was struggling to fulfil demand in Italy for a specific hydraulic grinding machine manufactured by Jung in Germany for the manufacture of high-quality ball bearings, indispensable to the war effort. Gatti arranged for one to be examined by Ferrari’s engineers, Giberti, Massimino and Bellentani included, who set about copying it faithfully.

Mr Ferrari sought permission from Jung — Italy and Germany being Axis allies — only for the Germans to reject his approach, quite reasonably because they were unable to provide the technical assistance required and, less reasonably, because they doubted ‘Italian industry’s ability to achieve the standards required for such complex machines’. Legal advice then judged that Ferrari could go ahead with or without a licence.

So volume production of Ferrari’s Jung-like grinding machines began in Modena, to supply eager Italian industry. They carried a plate bearing the Cavallino Rampante symbol and lettered ‘SCUDERIA FERRARI — MODENA’. In due course Auto-Avio Costruzioni even exported machines to Germany, as Allied bombing there took its toll.

Within Fascist wartime Italy, prominent industrialists were expected to belong to — or at least to declare support for — the Fascist regime. Many paid lip service, if only for a quiet life. Others actively sought association for business advancement. Some were genuine believers. Party membership was an unwritten requirement, as was membership of one of the Fascist industrial associations. At Alfa Romeo in Milan, Ugo Gobbato assumed the high profile of a keen Fascist supporter.

In provincial lower-profile Modena, Mr Ferrari was less open, describing himself then and subsequently as ‘not political’. His real quest was to pursue the best for himself, for his company and — as he saw it — for his people. But through the period 1940–43 he really did not need to be an effusive Fascista because he had already assumed the status of a local and national sporting treasure, far transcending the position of businessmen ingratiating themselves with a government they could not change.

Meanwhile, hard-working, dedicated, industrious Modena had always leaned well to the left, towards radical, socialist and communist persuasions. Many of the most vocal local leaders and unionists were distinctly anti-Fascist, sometimes rashly so, and many suffered harsh consequences.

Late in 1943, Ferrari moved his still-growing precision-engineering company into new premises in Maranello, at the foot of the Apennine chain, some 11 miles (18km) south of Modena. He would recall: ‘I moved to Maranello at the end of 1943 because of the industrial decentralisation law that was imposed on factories’, in order to escape Allied bombing of Italy’s established industrial centres. ‘I chose this place at the foot of the so-called Gothic Line because I owned a piece of land close to the site of the present factory’ at Fiorano adjoining Maranello where his post-war company would establish its famous test track.

The move had not been simple. He had first studied properties in Carpi and Formigine, before being tipped off that a site could become available close by his Fiorano acreage, which had itself been four small local farms. The tip came via his friend Girolamo ‘Mino’ Ferrari Amorotti, youngest son of a family prominent within Modenese society and considerable local landowners. Despite his ‘Ferrari’ middle name, there was no blood tie whatsoever between ‘Mino’ and Enzo. But Amorotti’s eldest brother Giuseppe was podesta — effectively mayor — of Maranello. While within Fascist Italy podesta was a status conferred by the King, it was in reality a government appointment, each term running for five years.

Known as the Fondo Cavani and situated alongside the Via Giardini, the new plot of land was roughly triangular and comprised only some 20,000 square metres. On November 30, 1942, Mr Ferrari wrote urgently to podesta Giuseppe Amorotti. He explained he had already obtained backing from the Bologna-based III Delefag (Delegazione Interprovinciale per le Costruziuoni di Guerra) to build a factory upon the site. Promptly, on December 4, permission was given, and on December 16 Ferrari’s land purchase from a couple named Colombini was confirmed, and celebrated — as traditional in then rural Italy — by a dinner. Ferrari engaged the Riziero Soragni construction company to begin building his new Maranello factory.

Shortly before the move, greater change had been engulfing Italy. The war had gone catastrophically badly. Allied air raids had been obliterating the industrial areas of Turin and Milan — pounding in particular the Alfa Romeo Portello works, which was the largest industrial complex in Europe after Mercedes-Benz in Germany — and even Rome itself had been bombed. After Mussolini was forced from power on July 25, 1943, Marshal Pietro Badoglio assumed the role of new prime minister, and King Vittorio Emanuele III assumed titular command of the armed forces. Badoglio urged the people to rally around the King and warned that any attempt to disrupt public order would be severely punished.

Ezio Bompani, a junior member of the Auto-Avio Costruzioni staff, later told New Zealand researcher David Manton: ‘When we went to work on the morning of July 26th, we saw all these soldiers on guard in front of the factory. What had happened? Was the factory occupied? We didn’t know anything.’

But the tall figure of Mr Ferrari was there, genially welcoming his men back to work: ‘We were all formally invited into the canteen to celebrate. The foremen had been given two demijohns of wine, and we were each handed a glass of wine to celebrate the event.’ Left-minded shop-floor workers drank as much to the success of the partisans that the majority of them had supported for years as to the future of their company and of their nation.

And so within 48 hours Fascist Italy had become a fast-changing republic, if not yet a democratic one, whose leaders were suddenly seeking immediate peace with the Allied forces, which were slowly but so ferociously gaining the upper hand against Nazi Germany.

Mr Ferrari, a high-profile figure at the forefront of Fascist Italy’s sporting achievements as well as a prominent if provincial industrialist, needed adept diplomacy, considerable political skill and a great deal of luck to navigate his way through Italy’s war. It helped that he had always cultivated a close and strong relationship with his workers, who very largely recognised and accepted him as being extremely fair, considerate and even paternalistic — while also loudly dominant, tough and always relentlessly demanding.

From as early as 1940–41 Mr Ferrari had sought to insure ‘against future difficulty’ by maintaining clandestine relationships with the underground local communist party, and subsequently with active partisans who constituted internal Italian resistance as German forces swiftly occupied ‘turncoat’ Italy as far south as Naples, fighting Allied land forces invading from Sicily and North Africa — and achieving great success in slowing their advance upon the homelands of the Third Reich.

As the war’s front line between occupying Germans and invading Allies rumbled slowly, but inexorably, closer to Modena, Mr Ferrari progressively contributed increasing support to the partisans. After the move into the newly built factory halls at Maranello, moonlight operations there would see partisan firearms serviced and even stored. Sergio Scaglietti, who became a close personal friend of Mr Ferrari, was celebrated locally not only for his developing prowess as a panel-basher but also as the Modena partisans’ expert bomb-maker.

Ferrari kept his home in the Viale Trento e Trieste, never moving his family to the new Maranello site, but he would spend occasional time with Lina who had settled in a house he also owned in Settecani, a few miles away in ‘the safe’ countryside.

Meanwhile, he had to walk a desperately thin, unstable tightrope to maintain workmanlike relations with hardliners from both far right and far left. Despite Mussolini’s fall, local Fascist parties were active in trying to maintain support, with the ‘Modena Federation’ voting to punish industrialists enriched during the Fascist period who were now abandoning their cause. As for the other extreme, communists merely assumed that Mr Ferrari was just another wartime profiteer, accumulating wealth from the misery inflicted upon the workers more by decades of unrestrained capitalism than by Fascismo itself.

At around 3pm on October 12, 1944, a former security guard named Fillipponi, who was known to Mr Ferrari, felt sufficiently moved by discreet gossip to write to him as follows:

Commendatore,

In the most private manner I am letting you know that a few minutes ago it was reported to my wife, from Mrs Ada who lives next door to Pirri, that at the last meeting of the Republican Party names of the people who were to be executed for over-profiteering were mentioned. Amongst those names were yours and that of Orsi [Adolfo Orsi, owner of a major Modena foundry as well as Maserati]. The execution of about 18 or 19 people should take place before the 28th. I thought it my duty to notify you of this without beating about the bush, or trying to investigate the truth of these facts.

With utmost respect,

A. Fillipponi

Another friend of Mr Ferrari’s, Carlo Benzi, recalled: ‘On November 27–28 there was a raid by the communist partisans in the cul-de-sac of Fontanile, in front of the factory where Ferrari was evacuated. Ferrari was told to stay inside and not to worry about anything. During the night some shots were heard and after that, nothing. In the morning the partisans tell Ferrari, “Nello is here, all is fine, all is finished”.’ Benzi stated that Mr Ferrari had made a payment of 500,000 Lire to have the death threat ‘withdrawn’ in this way.

Another unverified story from this terrifying period concerns either a second death threat or is a distortion of the first. This was made either by local criminals or by a genuine partisan element, and was this time averted by Mr Ferrari in effect buying survival for a reputed 1,000,000 Lire, claimed to represent a modern value exceeding £2,500,000.

In December 1944, two months after the Filippone letter, eight local criminals were tried for masquerading as partisans to extort payment from local industrialists. Justice was quick. They were found guilty and shot.

Luca Dal Monte describes how Ferrari clandestinely arranged shelter and care for some prominent partigiani who had been wounded and their family members, and he certainly assisted vulnerable local Jews too, such as his attorney friend Enzo Levi.

On April 6, 1945, the invading Allied forces launched their great spring offensive, Operation Grapeshot, finally to purge northern Italy of German occupation. Hostilities ceased on May 2 with the German forces’ formal surrender.

In Milan four days earlier, long after the city had been cleared of occupying forces and with local industry working to establish some kind of renewed order, Alfa Romeo boss Ugo Gobbato was shot dead in the street by an unidentified assailant. Three weeks later, in Bologna on May 17, 1945, Edoardo Weber of carburettor fame — Mr Ferrari’s personal friend and sometime business partner — was kidnapped while walking home from his factory and never seen again.

What this period must have been like — how tense, how pressured, how risky — for Enzo Ferrari, wife Laura and son Dino, his mother Adalgisa, and indeed for his colleagues and employees at Maranello, we can only imagine.

According to Ezio Bompani, ‘Ferrari gave a 1,500 Lire payment to all the Ferrari workers who had joined the partisans and to all partisans who were former Ferrari employees. He has been described as “a workers’ friend”, but he was an enlightened man. He looked further than just his factory.’

And indeed a new ray of sunshine entered his life just five days after the shocking disappearance of his friend Weber. On May 22, 1945, Lina Lardi gave birth to his second son, named after her late brother Piero. He was born in the house that Ferrari had provided for her, in Settecani, four miles east of Maranello, seven miles south of Viale Trento e Trieste, Modena, where Dino was then 13. For years news of his half-brother would be kept from him, and Piero Lardi would grow to maturity with his paternity a closely guarded secret.

From the years of war, Mr Ferrari and his machine-tool business emerged more or less intact. The new Maranello factory had sustained some damage from Allied strafing, bombing and a light artillery ‘dusting’ inflicted by the advancing Allied armies. The entire Modena area, however, had escaped the awful fate of other Italian towns, such as Salerno, Anzio and especially Monte Cassino, which had been obliterated. Despite what might too lightly be described as Mr Ferrari’s ‘character-building’ experiences during this entire convulsion, he plainly emerged as having had ‘a good war’. Despite the ransoms, he was quite a wealthy man and still commanded considerable local respect. So what — upon the return of peace — does a committed racer with both wealth and enduringly worthwhile connections do?

Absolutely right. He ignores the devastation he sees all around him. He ignores the high probability of a massive post-war recession in which the major challenge for most men would be merely to feed and house their families.

Instead, he becomes obsessively immersed in a programme to design, build and race an entirely new kind of high-performance competition car, to create a motor manufacturing company under his own name, and to launch a series of sophisticated and exotic high-cost production cars to be sold only to the world’s richest, most discerning, enthusiastic, motor-minded glitterati.

To do that, he first had to pick his way around the smoking craters, and bomb debris, and impossibilities of northern Italy, and make contact with old friends and colleagues who had fallen on hard times but were hoping for a benign new dictator to parachute back into their lives and who might even offer them a job.