Publicity:
| “A lot of our leaders look like they arrived yesterday from the moon. Instead, they’ve been for 20 years in the crucial position.” LUCA DI MONTEZEMOLO, CHAIRMAN OF FERRARI |
| |
|
| Luca di Montezemolo is deeply frustrated. As the Chairman of Ferrari, he’s responsible for one of the car world’s most desirable products. Last year Ferrari enjoyed its best year on record. The brand is stronger than ever. But brand Italy is being tarnished by poor political leadership. Montezemolo and other entrepreneurs say it is time their country took a new direction. |
|
|
| In an interview for Foreign Correspondent, Montezemolo tells Emma Alberici: |
|
|
| In a journey that takes her from Ferraris and fashion houses of Milan to the parmesan cheese factories that generate two and a half billion dollars annually, Alberici meets entrepreneurs, small business owners, and political leaders, including the current Prime Minister Mario Monti, and the man many are tipping will lead Italy after next week, Pier Luigi Bersani. |
|
|
| A former communist, Bersani tells Alberici his top priority will be to repeal laws that have allowed Mr Berlusconi to avoid prison, despite having more than 100 cases brought against him. |
|
|
| Berlusconi’s chances are improving in the polls and it’s expected his party will control the Senate. Meanwhile the man Europeans call “Super Mario” because he pulled Italy back from the brink of economic collapse looks set to be thrown out by Italian voters. |
|
|
| Mario Monti tells Alberici: “We brought back respect for Italy in the world" and restored the “Made in Italy” brand. |
|
|
| That’s unlikely to cut it with voters, who are upset about new taxes introduced by the Monti government. |
|
| Fashion Week preparations | Music | 00:00 |
| Fashion Week catwalk | ALBERICI: Is it ever not fashion week in Milan? In the capital of Italian style, couture seems perpetually on show. | 00:12 |
| Alberici at Zegna show | Today it’s Zegna striding down the runway. | 00:20 |
| Zegna show | Music | 00:23 |
|
| ALBERICI: Buyers have come from all over the world to see and order the latest range. | 00:37 |
|
| Music | 00:42 |
|
| ANNA ZEGNA: “Italy has always had a part in a culture where | 00:49 |
| Anna Zegna | craftsmanship has been developed. The sense of beauty is embedded in our history, | 00:53 |
| Zegna show | in our main artists from the Caravaggio to the Michelangelo. This sense is really part of our DNA”. | 00:58 |
|
| ALBERICI: If you were looking to find evidence of Italy’s financial woes, you’re not going to find it here. | 01:10 |
| Luxury labels | Music | 01:17 |
| Zegna store | ALBERICI: This fourth generation fiercely Italian family business employs seven thousand people and last year sold $1.2 billion dollars worth of clothes and accessories. | 01:26 |
|
| ANNA ZEGNA: [Director, Zegna] “We have a Zegna school, for example, in the company that educates our people. We have master tailors | 01:39 |
| Anna Zegna. Super: | and technicians in the company that teach the younger generation how to cut and create a model. It’s something that you cannot improvise. It’s really serious, passionate work that continues from one generation to the other”. | 01:47 |
| Milan high street luxury stores | ALBERICI: What Zegna, and for that matter plenty of other North Italian businesses amply demonstrate, is the great Italian contradiction. How can Italians get it so right in business, yet so wrong in government? “Is there a kind of | 02:03 |
| di Montezemolo. | tension between entrepreneurs, industry, business people on the one hand and the political class in Italy on the other?” LUCA DI MONTEZEMOLO: [Chairman, Ferrari] “Absolutely, yes. To be an entrepreneur | 02:22 |
| Super: Luca di Montezemolo | in Italy is very difficult. I want to push to have the opposite, to again to have red carpets to who wants to invest money to create jobs, to create new activities in Italy. This is something that the political leading class doesn’t understand”. | 02:33 |
| Milan luxury fashion stores | ALBERICI: Italy changes governments like a Milan model changes outfits and now that it’s all up for grabs again this weekend, is there really much of a chance any of the four frontrunners can change things for the better? | 02:54 |
| Alberici greets Monti | There’s the professor called in to rescue Italy from economic collapse. He’s on track to deliver a surplus but he’s not made himself popular in the process. | 03:09 |
| Monti. Super: | MARIO MONTI: [Prime Minister] “I say that it has been a crime for Italy to arrive at this state”. | 03:26 |
| Bersani at podium | ALBERICI: There’s the former communist who fun-loving, free-trading Italians are falling for in big numbers and is favourite to take the top job. | 03:32 |
| Bersani | PIER LUIGI BERSANI: “We probably have the world’s best entrepreneurs”. | 03:46 |
| Grillo in office | ALBERICI: There’s the former comedian who reckons politicians are the joke, his country’s a laughing stock and it’s time to go back to the drawing board. | 03:53 |
| Grillo | BEPPE GRILLO: “They have gnawed this country to pieces and now that’s enough. It’s got to stop, either with the vote or a baseball bat”. | 04:03 |
| Berlusconi in TV studio | ALBERICI: And then there’s the showstopper, the ultimate come-back king, the man who surely must hold some kind of world record for scandal survival. Many think he should be in gaol. Instead he’s having yet another swing at running the show and he’s surged back into contention. Shameless, indestructible – Silvio Berlusconi. | 04:12 |
| di Montezemolo. | LUCA DI MONTEZEMOLO: “For me, Berlusconi has been a big delusion. He announced the liberal revolution and unfortunately he didn’t do it. He was in condition to be the leader of a very strong majority and he didn’t do the crucial important reforms. So I have to say unfortunately that altogether Mr Berlusconi failed”. | 04:44 |
| Severgnini. Super: | BEPPE SEVERGNINI: “He’s one of those larger than life characters that sometimes you have in show business or in business or in sport or whatever. It’s fair enough, I mean but if you have a man who’s been running the country, been Prime Minister three times whose own idea is, you know, let’s be more spectacular than Lady Gaga, I don’t think is a good idea”. | 05:09 |
| Berlusconi in TV studio | Music | 05:36 |
| Alberici driving Ferrari around Rome |
| 05:45 |
|
| ALBERICI: If only they could produce a government like Ferrari produces a car – for many, the very best car money can buy. This fancy little shopping trolley is the Ferrari FF. It drives like a dream, presumably all the way up to its top speed of 335 kilometres an hour – but no one’s going anywhere fast here in Rome. | 05:57 |
|
| Music | 06:22 |
| Inside Ferrari plant | ALBERICI: It’s a measure of the strength of brand Italy that in a world where making things has become the domain of developing economies, one in five Italian workers is still employed in the manufacturing sector. LUCA DI MONTEZEMOLO: “Behind fantastic | 06:40 |
| di Montezemolo | products there are fantastic people. My biggest patrimonial are the women and the men that work inside Ferrari”. | 06:55 |
| Ferrari plant. Robot | ALBERICI: Incidentally, the country’s single biggest export isn’t fashion or fast cars, it’s the precision machinery on the production line, like this Ferrari robot. | 07:04 |
| di Montezemolo in office | Luca di Montezemolo is the Chairman of Ferrari, the face of the iconic formula one team and also the President of the Italian company responsible for Europe’s first private high speed trains. He’s craving a new approach to government. | 07:20 |
| di Montezemolo | LUCA DI MONTEZEMOLO: “Sometimes I’m surprised to see a lot of our leaders that they look like they arrive yesterday from the moon... instead they’ve been for 20 years in the crucial position”. | 07:39 |
| Unveiling of new Ferrari | ALBERICI: In 2012 Ferrari enjoyed its best year on record – Italy, on the other hand, teetered on the brink of economic catastrophe. | 07:51 |
| Monti montage | Mario Monti was called in as Mr Fix It. In Brussels he’s known as Super Mario because he did manage to rescue Italy from financial ruin, but while he’s winning acclaim across Europe, he’s trailing badly in the election race at home. | 08:13 |
| Monti. Super: | MARIO MONTI: “We brought back respect for Italy in the world and suddenly new realisation of Italians living abroad, of which there are so many in Australia -- just about 5% of, around 5% of the population I understand -- more or less eight hundred and fifty thousand people, to feel pride of being Italians. We cannot afford the word “Italian” to be under quoted in the stock exchange of adjectives describing countries because that would reflect negatively on the “made in Italy”, on everything Italian”. | 08:30 |
|
| ALBERICI: “Do you think Italians understand what’s good for them?” MARIO MONTI: “If one | 09:20 |
|
| explains clearly to the Italian people what is at stake, why it makes sense to suffer a bit today in order to have a better future, especially for our children, Italians are learning quickly, I’m convinced”. | 09:24 |
| Street scenes | ALBERICI: Individually, Italians are a pretty thrifty bunch. Compared with the rest of the world there’s very little private debt, but successive Italian governments have racked up a public debt now worth a whopping 120% of GDP. Perhaps if they could claw back some of the estimated half a trillion dollars swirling around in the black economy, things wouldn’t feel so bad for ordinary Italians now being forced to cough up. | 09:45 |
| Alberici on street | As you might have gathered by now my background is Italian. My parents were part of that post war migration. They actually met on the boat travelling to Melbourne in 1955. My mother was from the island of Ischia off Naples in the south and my father from the north here in Milan. He and his brothers owned bars which have now been taken over by the next generation. | 1019 |
| Alberici in bar with cousins | If you want to get a candid picture of life under austerity, family’s not a bad place to start. | 10:48 |
|
| MAURIZIO ALBERICI: “In my view, Mr Monti has been too clinical, too professorial. He’s great… a great person but to run a country you also need a degree of humanity”. | 10:57 |
|
| ALBERICI: My cousins, Maurizio and Danielle Alberici, run a busy bar and restaurant and they were doing okay until the Monti Government doubled property taxes and lifted the retirement age to sixty-seven – all while politicians continued to be paid three times the EU average. | 11:12 |
|
| DANIELLE ALBERICI: “I won’t vote at all this time because nothing will change. So after a year and six months…or two years in the Senate they get to claim a lifetime pension”. | 11:32 |
|
| ALBERICI: “Eighteen months”. | 11:47 |
|
| DANIELLE ALBERICI: “And meanwhile, ordinary people are asked to work till they’re almost 70 to take their pensions. 70! You reckon I’ll make it to 70 working here? I can barely do it now – on my feet from early morning till late at night”. | 11:50 |
| Maurizio | MAURIZIO ALBERICI: “The government needs to find a way to lower taxes for business people. We need lower taxes... more help from the State”. | 012:02 |
| Cheese making | Music | 12:13 |
|
| ALBERICI: Throughout northern Italy there’s endless examples of prosperous businesses run by smart people worrying that their prized brand Italy is being trashed by politicians. | 12:20 |
| Marino | EGINO MARINO: “We need a political class that can properly represent these companies that produce such excellence. Behind these companies are people who are excellent – so we need politicians who consider the interest of those people rather than just considering their own political interests”. | 12:36 |
| Cheese making | ALBERICI: They’ve been making Parmesan cheese in the Emilia Romagna region since well before my grandfather was working here. It’s now an industry employing 20,000 people, worth two and a half billion dollars a year. But Egino Marino worries that Italian governments have paid scant attention to promoting its world class businesses. EGINO MARINO: “Well I think that we have to look forward and not into the past | 12:58 |
| Marino | and therefore we have to be strong in our identity as a nation that has renowned excellence in manufacturing”. | 13:27 |
| Berlusconi in TV studio | ALBERICI: As business cries out for new thinking, increasingly Italians are being drawn back instead to the devil they know. | 13:40 |
| Alberici to camera | It’s been three and a half years since I last came to Italy to report on the scandal plagued now former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. | 13:55 |
|
| Since then he’s been forced out of office, convicted of tax fraud – he’s currently on trial for having sex with an under aged prostitute and lying to police to have her released from gaol. | 14:03 |
| Photos. Berlusconi and girlfriend | He’s recently announced his engagement to a television showgirl, fifty years his junior. After vowing to | 14:16 |
| Alberici to camera | never again return to the political fray, he’s back and enjoying quite some support. In fact, the polls show he’s more popular than Mario Monti, the economics professor who replaced him. | 14:23 |
| Berlusconi in TV studio with Giletti | It’s been, let’s say, a pretty unconventional campaign that’s featured among other things, interviews that almost turn to fisticuffs. MASSIMO GILETTI: [TV host, RAI] “Maybe a lot of people don’t love | 14:43 |
| Giletti. Super: | a lot Berlusconi but he has charisma. So it’s very difficult to interview him. He doesn’t accept the question. He prefer monologue”. | 14:57 |
| Berlusconi in TV studio with Giletti |
| 15:12 |
| Paparazzi with ‘Ruby the Heart Stealer’ | ALBERICI: And then there’s the little matter of the sex trial. They call her Ruby the Heart Stealer. She was seventeen when Mr Berlusconi is accused of paying her for sex. Earlier she was arrested for theft. The then Prime Minister of Italy called the police pleading that she be let go. He claimed she was the granddaughter of the then Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak – of course she wasn’t. | 15:20 |
| Berlusconi in TV studio | But while this trial has been running alongside the election campaign, it hasn’t proved a setback. Italians don’t seem too bothered by it all. BEPPE SEVERGNINI: “I would say that in the Sydney Olympics | 15:51 |
| Severgnini. Super: | in 2000 and London Olympics in 2012, I mean every Olympics basically, if one competition was like rule breaking, we would be probably gold, silver and bronze, but I’m not proud of that”. | 16:09 |
| Severgnini at computer |
| 16:24 |
|
| ALBERICI: Beppe Severgnini is one of the country’s most respected political commentators. For him, the return of Silvio Berlusconi is too much to bear. | 16:29 |
| Severgnini | BEPPE SEVERGNINI: “I think you can blame Mr Berlusconi for the economic woes of this country, for sort of winking at tax evasion, absolving many things and basically, for not cutting the social, not social but public spending, rationalising it. He basically, his line was, famous line, the crisis? What crisis? Is only in your head”. | 16:40 |
|
| ALBERICI: “Well given you’ve talked about Italy as a nation of rule breakers, Silvio Berlusconi is Italy’s rule breaker in chief”. | 17:13 |
|
| BEPPE SEVERGNINI: “He’s the rule breaker in chief and also he’s proud of that, which is even worse. I mean I don’t like rule breakers, but if you do and if you’re caught at least show some remorse. He doesn’t”. | 17:20 |
| Resin Berlusconi | Music | 17:32 |
|
| ALBERICI: It’s easy to characterise Silvio Berlusconi as a figure of fun, a leering sex crazed buffoon dreaming of bunga bunga parties, | 17:36 |
| Alberici and Garullo at resin sculpture of Berlusconi | but Antonio Garullo’s put two years of work into it. This resin sculpture caused quite a stir when it recently showed in one of Rome’s most famous galleries. | 17:44 |
|
| ANTONIO GARULLO: “So here in his right hand he is holding his official life story – the one he always uses for publicity. It details the highlights of his life and career”. | 17:56 |
|
| ALBERICI: Silvio Berlusconi has long described himself as the dream of all Italians and that’s the name of Antonio Garullo’s creation. ANTONIO GARULLO: “The other side tells us something else -- | 18:10 |
|
| a more intimate, personal story quite different to the official one – so his hand – as maybe you’ve already seen – is down his pants”. | 18:25 |
| Berlusconi supporters | ALBERICI: But the real Silvio isn’t drifting off into dreamland. In the real world he’s closing in on his main rival and he can – having deployed the weight of his enormous media empire, 80% of Italy’s commercial TV, newspapers and magazines. | 18:42 |
|
| MARIO MONTI: “So Berlusconi is a very charismatic person and a communicator with very special talent. | 19:06 |
| Monti. Super: | I cannot claim to have the glamour and the ability to entertain audiences that my predecessor, Mr Berlusconi, is very excellent in”. | 19:16 |
| di Montezemolo. Super: | LUCA DI MONTEZEMOLO: “I’ve also to say that Berlusconi has also a lot of instruments that in a normal country the conflict of interest is unbelievable”. ALBERICI: “Oh, the media”. | 19:32 |
|
| LUCA DI MONTEZEMOLO: “Can you, Mr Murdoch, be the prime minister in Australia? Impossible or not? Can the Mr, I don’t know the owner of CNN or Mr Turner want to be the president of the United States? It’s impossible or not? So there is something that Berlusconi was also in condition that all the other parties for different reason left him in this position”. | 19:44 |
| Bersani | PIER LUIGI BERSANI: “There is no doubt a peculiarity of Berlusconism – of Berlusconi in Italy. It is an important issue that needs to be corrected, and it will be corrected. And I think that one of the very first reforms that will need to be carried out will be in the field of communication. There is no doubt about it”. | 20:11 |
| Billboards of Bersani | Music | 20:31 |
|
| ALBERICI: If the polls are right, the Democrat’s Pier Luigi Bersani will emerge as Prime Minister with his political arch-enemy in his sights. Media reform will come first but he also intends to scrap laws that have enabled Silvio Berlusconi to evade gaol in 118 cases brought against him. | 20:38 |
| Bersani | PIER LUIGI BERSANI: “One of the first things that we intend to do is to abrogate these laws which in Italy we call “ad personam”, meaning in Latin “made for one person only”.” ALBERICI: “You mean Mr Berlusconi?” PIER LUIGI BERSANI: “Well, yes”. | 20:59 |
| Alberici and Grillo walk by sea | BEPPE GRILLO: “We need to get rid of all the political parties. | 21:13 |
|
| Now the Italian people look to others… we must look to others, okay? Let’s look to others beyond the political dilettantes… not professionals”. | 21:16 |
| Genovese coastline/Grillo and Alberici walk | Music | 21:38 |
|
| ALBERICI: Here on the stunning Genovese coastline, Beppe Grillo has been building a base of support that puts him in line for a big role in the next Italian parliament. This joker in the pack of politicians was once a comedian made famous starring in skit shows on Mr Berlusconi’s TV networks. | 21:45 |
| Grillo | BEPPE GRILLO: “A woman who raises three children and works as well – I want her as my Finance Minister. These are the people we’ll put in. That is why they’re scared shitless of letting this Movement in because it would be like having a parliament that you could open up like a can of tuna and where you could see inside. We would have transparency. When you shine a light on the thief he can’t steal from you any more”. | 22:10 |
| Grillo at rally on piazza | ALBERICI: Beppe Grillo’s star power can sure pack a piazza. The message is pretty popular too. He’s calling for a referendum to take Italy out of the Eurozone and back to the Lira. | 22:35 |
| Grillo | BEPPE GRILLO: “As it stands there are already 10 countries that are out of the Euro with no dramas. England even wants to get out of the European Union – and so what does that mean? These are signs that demonstrate that this concept of Europe – which was supposed to be about culture, religions, marvellous differences and knowledge, is actually more about a Europe centred around money, budgets… of spending reviews… of bankers… of exploiters… and scum!” | 22:53 |
| Rossella driving truck |
| 23:19 |
|
| ALBERICI: Like many Italians truck driver Tonino Rossella is angry about having to bear the brunt of austerity. He’s hankering for the good old bad old days of Silvio Berlusconi. | 23:27 |
|
| TONINO ROSSELLA: “In my view, the other Italian politicians are all jealous of Mr Berlusconi | 23:40 |
| Rossella with family | because he has what he has… and they don’t have it”. | 23:52 |
| Rossella driving truck | ALBERICI: Tonino Rossella doesn’t care about his politician’s peccadilloes, all he knows is that life was better when Mr Berlusconi was at the wheel. TONINO ROSSELLA: “The way I see it, all politicians are thieves but if Mr Berlusconi stole, he stole first – so now what’s left for him to steal? He’s full of money from his head to his toe. I’m more concerned about someone else | 23:57 |
| Rossella with family | who might be skinny and steals so he can eat some meat. But Mr Berlusconi on the other hand is nice and chubby and he’s 75 years old. He doesn’t need to steal anything any more… he has everything he needs”. WIFE OF TONINO ROSSELLA: “Even a 27 year old fiancée!” TONINO ROSSELLA: “A 27 year old and he’s paying his ex-wife 3 million Euros a month!” | 24:21 |
| La Scala/Falstaff performance | Music | 24:47 |
|
| ALBERICI: Nothing epitomises the high art and exacting standards of Italian production quite like La Scala, the glorious Opera House centre stage in Milan. | 24:52 |
|
| For more than 200 years it’s presented stunning performances starring opera greats from Italy and around the world. Tonight even the opera itself is home grown. It’s Falstaff by Milan’s very own Giuseppe Verdi. | 25:08 |
|
| [Singing] | 25:31 |
|
| ALBERICI: You couldn’t script the drama that passes as politics in Italy. Outside the parliament in Rome they’ve been doing things very well for a very long time. But times change and the hope is that the country’s ruling class will change too. LUCA DI MONTEZEMOLA: “I don’t like to talk about the past. I like to talk about the future. I like to introduce new people | 25:40 |
| di Montezemola | in the government and I like to introduce a new way to act between the politicians and the country”. | 26:03 |
| Falstaff performance | Music | 26:13 |
| Credits | Reporter – Emma Alberici Camera – Cameron Bauer Editor – Scott Monro Producer – Ian Altschwager
| 26:22 |