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Vittorio Valletta

Industrial executive (1883-1967) who ran FIAT from 1928 to 1966: from Fascism to reconstruction, from the 600 to Togliatti's Soviet contract.

Image from a Quattroruote publication
From a publication by Quattroruote, 3 July 2023

Vittorio Valletta (Sampierdarena, 28 July 1883 – Pietrasanta, 10 August 1967) was the executive who ran FIAT for nearly half a century: general manager from 1928, managing director from 1939, chairman from 1946 to 1966. Ligurian by birth and Turinese by education, the «Professor», as he was known, led the company through Fascism, the war and reconstruction, and presided over the years in which Turin became Italy's capital of mass-market cars.[1]

From accountancy to FIAT

The son of an army officer, in 1897 he enrolled in the commercial section of the Germano Sommeiller technical institute in Turin, graduating in 1901 as an accountant and commercial expert with top marks; in 1906 he obtained a degree from the School of Commerce. In 1904 he opened a small professional practice in the city, taught accounting at several schools, directed the Scuola media maschile di commercio from 1907, and in 1920 began teaching at university level, with an appointment at the School of Commerce.[1] Alongside teaching, he worked as a consultant for medium and large companies, especially in the car industry.[2]

It was Giovanni Agnelli who brought him into FIAT: according to the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, in 1921, as administrative director replacing his colleague and mentor Broglia; according to the Enciclopedia Italiana, as early as 1920.[1][2] In 1923 he became secretary of the board of directors, and in 1928 general manager. He designed a strongly centralised organisation, with central departments reporting weekly to the top, in the years when the Lingotto plant, opened in 1923, was the most modern factory in Europe.[1]

Managing director: Mirafiori and the war

After the death of Edoardo Agnelli, the founder's only son, in 1935, the senator prepared the succession by appointing Valletta managing director in February 1939.[1] A few months later, on 15 May 1939, Benito Mussolini inaugurated the Mirafiori plant. Agnelli and Valletta had conscripted thousands of employees for the ceremony, but no cheer rose from the forecourt: the Duce had arrived, of all things, in an Alfa Romeo, the Milanese rival's car.[3]

When Italy entered the war, Valletta chose to guarantee maximum production for military supplies, a line he himself described as «collaborating with the inevitable».[1] After 8 September 1943 he applied what his biographer Franco Amatori calls the chameleon technique: accepting the German occupiers' orders, practising silent obstruction, sparing workers from deportation to Germany, while at the same time funding the National Liberation Committee and keeping in contact with the Allies.[1]

Purge and return

At the Liberation the CLN entrusted FIAT to four commissioners — Gaudenzio Bono, Arnoldo Fogagnolo, Aurelio Peccei and Giovanni Battista Santhià — and Valletta, subjected to a purge proceeding, lived through that period almost in hiding, while still firmly keeping control of the company.[1] Yet the very men called to replace him considered him irreplaceable. Peccei recalled on 3 May 1982:

«Personally, I was in favour of a certain, even fairly broad, purge — but not of Valletta. He was not just useful, but necessary, indeed indispensable. [...] he was the only one who knew how to keep the company running»

Aurelio Peccei, 1982

After senator Agnelli's death in 1945[2] and the collaborationism charge against him dropped, Valletta triumphantly returned to the company in March 1946 and was appointed chairman that July.[1]

Reconstruction and mass motorisation

Between loans from American banks and Marshall Plan funding, FIAT obtained nearly 31 million dollars, about 12 per cent of the total allocated; the request Valletta submitted in October 1948 listed three thousand items of expenditure for renewing the plants.[1] The project for a family runabout was decided in July 1953 and entrusted to Dante Giacosa's technical office: the Fiat 600 debuted at the Geneva Motor Show in March 1955 at a price of 590,000 lire, roughly thirteen months of a worker's wages, and within a few months the Mirafiori lines were turning out a thousand a day.[4] In that same year, 1955, Valletta launched the doubling of Mirafiori, in 1957 came the Nuova 500; from 1950, in little more than a decade, car production grew tenfold, passing one million vehicles in 1963.[1]

The «Professor» and the unions

In labour relations Valletta fought the socialist-communist FIOM union, which lost the internal works-council elections in the mid-1950s, offering in exchange a company welfare system — housing, pensions, social insurance — superior to the rest of the metalworking sector, while demanding discipline and responsibility from those who joined FIAT.[1] Relations with the Turin church also grew close: to cardinal Maurilio Fossati, concerned about religious care for the mass of workers and immigrants, Valletta promised he would open the factory gates to labour chaplains, and parishes of the archdiocese went as far as issuing certificates of good conduct for former farmhands seeking employment.[5] The diocesan weekly La Voce e il Tempo sums up that policy with two sayings of the time, «from the cradle to the grave» and «of the stick and the carrot», designed to reduce social conflict on the factory floor and keep communists at bay.[6] The clash was not only metaphorical: after the attack on Palmiro Togliatti on 14 July 1948, communist union officials held him at Mirafiori, and his reply was blunt: «I will fire you all».[7]

Handover to Gianni Agnelli and final years

Valletta's last great undertaking was the contract with the Soviet government to build a large plant on the Volga, on the outskirts of Stavropol, later renamed Togliatti.[1] On 30 April 1966, at the company's headquarters on Corso Marconi 20, he proposed to the shareholders' meeting Gianni Agnelli, the founder's grandson and managing director since 1963, as his successor as chairman, with a line that became famous: «From today, Mr Agnelli is no longer just his grandfather's grandson».[8]

That same year, 1966, President of the Republic Giuseppe Saragat appointed him senator for life for outstanding merits in the social field.[1] A Cavaliere del Lavoro since 1952, he had been an honorary academician of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences since 1956.[2][9] He died in Pietrasanta, in Versilia, on 10 August 1967, just over a year after stepping down as chairman of FIAT.[1]

Pages linking here

Related articles: FIAT, Giovanni Agnelli (1866–1945), Stabilimento di Mirafiori

Sources

  1. Treccani – Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani —
  2. Treccani – Enciclopedia Italiana
  3. La Voce e il Tempo
  4. Quattroruote — 3 July 2023
  5. La Voce e il Tempo — 31 March 2025
  6. La Voce e il Tempo
  7. La Voce e il Tempo — 26 August 2024
  8. La Voce e il Tempo — 25 January 2023
  9. Pontificia Academia Scientiarum

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