Giovanni Pirelli. One Life, Many Lives
“I could sum it up like this: if I meet two people, one will ask me if I’m Pirelli the tyre maker, while the other will ask if I’m the Pirelli of the Lettere.”
A major player in one of the most important periods of the twentieth century, Giovanni Pirelli was destined to live the life of an industrial entrepreneur. And yet he also lived many other, very different lives. He was a soldier – a lieutenant in the Alpini corps – an aspiring aviator, Resistance fighter, writer, historian, and political and intellectual activist. The son of Alberto, he was a living example of one of his father’s precepts: “Always be a man of your time”. And indeed Giovanni Pirelli lived through all the crucial moments of the century of extremes in Italy: war and the Resistance, political militancy, diplomacy and interaction with the industrial world.
Giovanni Pirelli interpreted all the anxieties and outcomes of the century, brought about mainly by the Second World War. His experience of the conflict, in which he fought first as a private and then as an officer, led him to abandon his initial enthusiasm for defending the honour of the Nation in favour of a disillusioned search for a “new reality”. An attentive and sensitive observer of the places and people around him, he chose a strategic “frontier” position, opening up to many horizons. He was driven to soul-searching and intellectual thought that ultimately took shape when he joined the Resistance. From then on, his choices were clear: he joined the Italian Socialist Party and did not take his father’s place in the company, but followed his vocation by making the Resistance an essential part of his intellectual output.
One distinctive element could be seen in Giovanni Pirelli’s cultural versatility: his ability to bring together history and literature. Right from his debut book, L’altro elemento, published in Einaudi’s “I gettoni” series in 1952, he became one of the greatest commentators on the disaster that had been the war. What made him different from the few other people who wrote about it, such as Mario Rigoni Stern and Nuto Revelli, was the position he viewed it from: as a well-educated middle-class man and the son of one of the greatest entrepreneurs and diplomats of the time, he had a greater understanding of international interactions. Together with Piero Malvezzi, he edited one of the most important collections of memorial literature, Lettere di condannati a morte della Resistenza Italiana (“Letters of Italian Partisans Condemned to Death”) and in the late 1950s he published two articles in Pirelli magazine, under the pseudonym of Franco Fellini, in which he described his trip through Egypt with his friend Renato Guttuso. During the Reconstruction, his new political and cultural positions emerged in the discussions organised at the Einaudi bookshop. Here he met Paul Éluard, Ernest Hemingway, Elio Vittorini, John Steinbeck and many others, and he expressed himself through theatre, writing, cinema, music, documentaries and historical research.
A complex and fascinating figure, his human experience ended prematurely in a car accident on 3 April 1973. The variety of his interests and relationships paint a portrait of him as a rebel heir, who could never be made to conform to any precise model.
“I could sum it up like this: if I meet two people, one will ask me if I’m Pirelli the tyre maker, while the other will ask if I’m the Pirelli of the Lettere.”
A major player in one of the most important periods of the twentieth century, Giovanni Pirelli was destined to live the life of an industrial entrepreneur. And yet he also lived many other, very different lives. He was a soldier – a lieutenant in the Alpini corps – an aspiring aviator, Resistance fighter, writer, historian, and political and intellectual activist. The son of Alberto, he was a living example of one of his father’s precepts: “Always be a man of your time”. And indeed Giovanni Pirelli lived through all the crucial moments of the century of extremes in Italy: war and the Resistance, political militancy, diplomacy and interaction with the industrial world.
Giovanni Pirelli interpreted all the anxieties and outcomes of the century, brought about mainly by the Second World War. His experience of the conflict, in which he fought first as a private and then as an officer, led him to abandon his initial enthusiasm for defending the honour of the Nation in favour of a disillusioned search for a “new reality”. An attentive and sensitive observer of the places and people around him, he chose a strategic “frontier” position, opening up to many horizons. He was driven to soul-searching and intellectual thought that ultimately took shape when he joined the Resistance. From then on, his choices were clear: he joined the Italian Socialist Party and did not take his father’s place in the company, but followed his vocation by making the Resistance an essential part of his intellectual output.
One distinctive element could be seen in Giovanni Pirelli’s cultural versatility: his ability to bring together history and literature. Right from his debut book, L’altro elemento, published in Einaudi’s “I gettoni” series in 1952, he became one of the greatest commentators on the disaster that had been the war. What made him different from the few other people who wrote about it, such as Mario Rigoni Stern and Nuto Revelli, was the position he viewed it from: as a well-educated middle-class man and the son of one of the greatest entrepreneurs and diplomats of the time, he had a greater understanding of international interactions. Together with Piero Malvezzi, he edited one of the most important collections of memorial literature, Lettere di condannati a morte della Resistenza Italiana (“Letters of Italian Partisans Condemned to Death”) and in the late 1950s he published two articles in Pirelli magazine, under the pseudonym of Franco Fellini, in which he described his trip through Egypt with his friend Renato Guttuso. During the Reconstruction, his new political and cultural positions emerged in the discussions organised at the Einaudi bookshop. Here he met Paul Éluard, Ernest Hemingway, Elio Vittorini, John Steinbeck and many others, and he expressed himself through theatre, writing, cinema, music, documentaries and historical research.
A complex and fascinating figure, his human experience ended prematurely in a car accident on 3 April 1973. The variety of his interests and relationships paint a portrait of him as a rebel heir, who could never be made to conform to any precise model.