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Susanna Agnelli

Writer and politician from Turin (1922-2009), sister of Gianni Agnelli, the first woman to serve as Italy's Minister of Foreign Affairs and president of Telethon.

Image from the Formiche.net publication
From the Formiche.net publication, 2022-04-22

Susanna Agnelli (Turin, 24 April 1922 – Rome, 15 May 2009) was a writer, local administrator, member of parliament, and the first woman to head the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Italy, in the Dini government of 1995-1996.[1][2] Granddaughter of FIAT founder Giovanni Agnelli and sister of Gianni Agnelli, she recounted the childhood of Turin's most powerful family in a successful book, and from 1990 until her death led Telethon.[1][2]

An Agnelli childhood

She was the third of the seven children of Edoardo Agnelli and Virginia Bourbon del Monte.[3] Both parents died in accidents: her father lost his life at 43 when his seaplane, landing on the water at Genoa's seaplane base, struck a log and he was hit by the propeller; her mother died in a car accident at Forte dei Marmi in 1945.[2] Among her siblings were Gianni, the future "Avvocato", and Umberto Agnelli.

The strictness of that upbringing lives on in a remark by her English governess, Miss Parker, who used to warn the girl: "Don't forget you are an Agnelli".[4] A graduate in literature,[3] during the Second World War she enlisted as a volunteer Red Cross nurse.[3] In a 1995 interview she recalled starting, at fifteen, together with some friends, to look after the poor children of the Turin neighbourhood where she lived, helping them with homework and giving them food, and admitted that behind it lay boredom with the life that women of her set were expected to lead.[5]

Marriage and the years in Argentina

At the end of the war she married Count Urbano Rattazzi just eighteen days after meeting him: "we got married there, eighteen days after we met," she would later recall.[6] Rattazzi, a young officer in the 1941-1942 Russian campaign, had met Gianni Agnelli on that very front; he died in 2012.[7] The couple lived for a long time in Argentina and had six children; the marriage, celebrated in 1945, ended in divorce in 1975.[3][6]

«Vestivamo alla marinara»

In 1975 Vestivamo alla marinara was published, an autobiographical novel that won the Bancarella prize.[1] The publisher presents it as the portrait of a family in which it was not easy to be a child or a teenager, and at the same time as a picture of Italian high society from fascism to the end of the Second World War.[8] Guia Soncini, writing in Linkiesta, ranked it among the most underrated twentieth-century Italian novels, recalling the passage about an Easter spent in Rome with her grandmother, who scolded the mother for dressing her daughters like a grocer's children.[9] It was followed by Gente alla deriva (1980), Ricordati Gualeguaychu (1982) and Addio, addio mio ultimo amore (1985); for many years she also wrote an advice column, Lettere private, in the weekly magazine Oggi.[10] The tone of that column became proverbial: to a reader quarrelling with her husband over what to name their son, she replied: "Buy yourselves a dog: at most, he'll be the one with the problems."[2]

From Argentario to the Farnesina

Her public career began far from Piedmont: from 1974 to 1984 she was mayor of Monte Argentario, in the province of Grosseto.[1][3] In 1976 she entered the Chamber of Deputies on the lists of the Republican Party; in 1979 she was also elected to the European Parliament, from which she resigned after two years.[1][3] A senator from 1983, re-elected in 1987, she was undersecretary for Foreign Affairs from 1983 to 1991, under ministers Giulio Andreotti and Gianni De Michelis.[3][11] Of Andreotti she said she had learned never to underestimate the person she was speaking with and to listen to everyone's reasons.[5] Between 1984 and 1987 she sat on the International Commission on Humanitarian Issues and the World Commission on Environment and Development.[3]

In January 1995 Lamberto Dini called her to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a post she held until May 1996.[3][10] In the same month, on 21 May 1996, she was made a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic.[12] The journalist Massimo Franco described her as the least Turinese and at the same time the most public of the Agnellis, bound to her brother Gianni by a mutual fondness.[11]

Telethon and Il Faro

In the 1970s she had chaired the Italian WWF, according to Treccani in the 1978-1979 period.[1] In 1990 she brought Telethon to Italy, the charity television marathon born in the United States, and remained its president until her death.[2] The foundation was created at the request of the families of patients with muscular dystrophy; the first marathon on the Rai networks raised more than 20 billion lire.[13] Under her presidency Telethon broadened its research to all genetic diseases, founded the Tigem (1996) and SR-Tiget (1999) institutes and adopted merit-based criteria for selecting projects; in 2009 she was succeeded by Luca di Montezemolo.[13]

In 1997 she founded Il Faro in Rome, to train and place immigrants and marginalised young people in jobs, in a building that had housed a school for professional nurses.[14] According to Massimo Franco, that school had been founded by her mother Virginia.[11] In the first year, 170 young people were placed in jobs.[14]

"But these are 170 young people who, without us, would be out on the street turning to crime—and it's from small things that great things are born."

Susanna Agnelli, interview with Vita, 2002

In 2015 the foundation, based in Monteverde in a Red Cross building, trained between 200 and 250 young people a year with intensive two-month courses, and 60 per cent of participants obtained a regular job contract immediately afterwards; since 1997 more than 2,500 young people had been placed in jobs.[15]

Death

She died in Rome on 15 May 2009, at the Policlinico Gemelli, where she had been hospitalised for about a month for complications following a fall at home and a fractured femur.[3][4] In 1984 she had received an honorary law degree from Mount Holyoke College, in Massachusetts.[3]

Related articles: Massimo d'Azeglio, Moncalieri, Victor Emmanuel II

Pages linking here

Sources

  1. Treccani
  2. Formiche.net — 22 April 2022
  3. Quotidiano.net (QN) — 15 May 2009
  4. GiornaleSM — 15 May 2009
  5. Alain Elkann Interviews (Capital) —
  6. Il Sussidiario — 7 October 2021
  7. Panorama — 18 February 2014
  8. Mondadori
  9. Linkiesta —
  10. Sapere.it (De Agostini)
  11. 150anni.it (Massimo Franco)
  12. Presidenza della Repubblica
  13. Fondazione Telethon
  14. Vita — 27 June 2002
  15. Agenzia Dire — 10 April 2015

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