gianni agnelli yacht

A short history of Gianni Agnelli’s incredible car and yacht collection

From a custom-made 36 metre yacht to a fiat panda, these are the most outrageous vessels and vehicles owned by the italian industrialist.

Words: Jonathan Wells

Gianni Agnelli, the fashion-forward Fiat chairman, always wore hiking boots with his impeccably tailored suits. Why? Because the Italian industrialist — and consummate style icon — once sustained a leg injury so severe that the sturdy choice in footwear was forced upon him. The accident? A car crash — while speeding away from an intimate encounter with a woman who was neither his wife or girlfriend.

That was 1952. But, despite giving himself a life-altering injury behind the wheel, the old cad wasn’t put off motoring. In fact, in the decades to follow, Agnelli spent thousands and thousands on his automotive obsession. He ordered Pininfarina-designed Ferraris. He thrashed his modest Fiat 125 sedan about Turin. The businessman was even known to drive his own chauffeur around — such was his desire to get behind the wheel.

And it didn’t end with cars. Yachts and speedboats, too, were a known vice of L’Avvocato, or ‘The Lawyer’, as Agnelli was widely known. Below, we’ve rounded up the finest vessels and vehicles that this fascinating, fashionable man ever owned…

1992 Lancia Delta Integrale Spider

Let’s start with a car Agnelli kept until the end. L’Avvocato drove his one-off Lancia Delta Integrale until his death in 2003. And, though it now resides in the Museo Nazionale dell’automobile di Torino, you can see why he loved it. Commissioned to ensure he felt power at his fingertips and wind in his hair, this was a unique four-wheel-drive convertible — complete with two doors, 250 horsepower and a front design as immediately recognisable as the original.

1986 Ferrari Testarossa Spider

Courtesty of Artcurial

Perhaps the most famous car of the Italian industrialist, his 1986 Testarossa Spider was a present from Agnelli to Agnelli. He commissioned the one-off drop-top to commemorate his 20-year anniversary as president of Fiat — and the car was meticulous engineered by Ferrari, who solved the problem of fitting a folding roof around a mid-mounted, 5.0 litre, 12 cylinder engine in style.

A 12-metre mahogany yacht, Tomahawk

Agnelli’s first yacht, Tomahawk was a sight to behold. Bought in 1956, she sported an all-steel and mahogany construction and was stuffed to the gunnels with style. A 12 metre vessel built in 1939 to a Charles Nicholson design, Tomahawk was originally crafted to compete in the America’s Race. But Agnelli cooled on his investment in 1962, and sold it to his sister Susanna.

1993 Fiat Panda 4X4 Trekking

Courtesy of Aste Bolaffi 

Now this may be our favourite of Agnelli’s many, many motors. Not only is it the most recent commission we’ve included on this illustrious list — it’s also one of the most unassuming. Humble and practical, the businessman wanted a trusty runaround to drive about St Moritz . The Panda fit the bill. Decked out in his preferred silver and blue colour scheme (like the Testarossa above), it’s a pocket-sized joy.

An 82-foot yawl, Agneta

A true Mediterranean legend. Agneta , originally launched in 1951, was bought by Agnelli in 1959 — who took her to Europe, where she remains to this day. With a Burmese teak deck, Canadian silver spruce spars and even a marble fireplace in the owner’s stateroom, this 82 foot yawl is perhaps the most decadent of all of Agnelli’s vessels. Our favourite feature? Those distinctive, rich red port-wine sails.

1950 Ferrari 166 MM

Courtesy of Concorso d’Eleganza

Back in 2015, this handsome 1950 Ferrari 166 won the Coppa d’Oro Villa d’Este. It’s a prestigious prize — and one which we’re sure would make its ex-owner, Agnelli, smile. Number 24 of only 25 ever built, this gorgeous little old Barchetta is a masterclass is simple styling. And it can back up that beauty under the bonnet; the same model won the 1949 Le Mans and Spa 24 hour races. No wonder he wanted it in his collection.

1971 Fiat 130 Familiare ‘Villa d’Este’

This is a fun one. The Fiat 130 sedan was the Italian carmaker’s flagship model for a time. And, in 1971, the brand used the car as the basis for the 130 Familiare estate. Only four were ever built — and all were owned by members of Agnelli’s family. This, the ‘Villa d’Este’, had imitation wood on the side — a style quirk borrowed from the US, and a large wicker basket to carry Agnelli’s skis in back from St Moritz.

A 37 foot speedboat, G. Cinquanta

Remi Dargegen © 2020 Courtesy of RM Sotheby’s

In 1968, Agnelli took delivery of G. Cinquanta — a sleek, super speedboat designed by Sonny Levi. With four BPM V-8 Vulcano engines, the 37 foot cruiser never acted its age — and is currently up for sale through RM Sotheby’s 50 years later. No wonder the Italian loved it; with one of Levi’s signature ‘Delta’ hulls, a central cockpit designed by Pininfarina and 1,280 horsepower, what’s not to like?

1959 Ferrari 400 Superamerica S1 Pininfarina Coupe Speciale

Soon after he became the chairman of Fiat, the 400 Super America was designed by Pininfarina and built specifically for Gianni Agnelli. With its type 163 engine and near-prototype status, it was the car that cemented his deep respect for the Ferrari marque, and was painted once more in his preferred colour scheme of blue and silver.

A 36 metre maxi yacht, Extra Beat

Imagine, for a moment, commissioning your first ever bespoke yacht — overseeing its design and construction — and then feeling a little unattached to it when it finally bobs into view? Because that’s what happened with Agnelli’s Extra Beat . Built in 1988 by Abeking & Rasmussen, the Italian industrialist was a little lukewarm on the 36 metre maxi yacht when it was finally delivered. Well, if you’ve got the money to try again…

A 93 foot high performance yacht, Stealth

To make up for the disappointment of Extra Beat above, in 1996 Agnelli deferred to naval architect Germán Frers, who had created a revolutionary hull and designed Stealth for the businessman. Crafted from carbon fibre, the yacht sported white seats, black sails and a teak deck — the very height of opulence. Today, she is owned by Lapo Elkann, Agnelli’s grandson.

1966 Ferrari 365 P Berlinetta Speciale

And finally, to round things off, yet another Ferrari. But not just any Ferrari. Above, you’ll see one of only three 365 P Berlinetta Speciales ever made. Two went to Agnelli. And it’s not only the first road going mid-engined V12 Ferrari ever made — it also has a three-abreast seating arrangement, with the wheel in the middle. What else did you expect to round off the car collection of such a pioneering man?

Want more from Ferrari? Here’s why the Ferrari F355 Berlinetta helped supercars shift gear…

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Life Lessons

Fabulous Life Lessons From Gianni Agnelli

By Steven Kurutz

• Dec. 6, 2017

With his aquiline nose, swept-back hair and bare chest bronzed by the Mediterranean sun, Gianni Agnelli came across like a modern-day Roman Emperor. He was sometimes called “the rake of the Riviera,” for his love of fast cars, sailboats, clothing and beautiful women.

But the new documentary “Agnelli,” directed by Nick Hooker and debuting on HBO on Dec. 18, shows Mr. Agnelli, who was the head of Fiat and died in 2003, to have been something rarer: a playboy with gravitas. He saw battle in World War II, and ran his family’s car company, which was once Italy’s largest private business. When Henry A. Kissinger appears on screen praising the shrewdness of “L’Avvocato,” or the Lawyer, as Mr. Agnelli was nicknamed, you realize that, despite the tan, this wasn’t George Hamilton with an Italian accent.

Yes, Mr. Agnelli was a creature of a more chauvinist time. He was an inattentive father. He believed that being discreet about extramarital affairs was the mark of a good husband. And he was unquestionably vain. Nevertheless, as the film shows, modern men can still learn a few things about style and living the good life from Mr. Agnelli.

He Lived Courageously

During Italy’s so-called Years of Lead in the mid-1970s, a communist paramilitary organization known as the Red Brigades assassinated businessmen and political leaders, including the country’s prime minister, Aldo Moro. Mr. Agnelli was surely a target. Yet he bravely drove to work every day in his Fiat compact, exuding strength and calm to his workers and the nation. “He thought that a day when someone tries to assassinate you and fails is a more interesting day than when they don’t,” Mr. Hooker said.

He Set His Own Fashion Rules

One of the funniest moments in the documentary is a montage of men who copied Mr. Agnelli’s sui generis look of wearing his watch over his shirt cuff. For him, it was a practical response to a problem. “The cuffs were very tight on the shirts he had made,” Mr. Hooker said. “He couldn’t fit a watch under.” It’s a goofy move, and the guys who do it look ridiculous. Except, of course, Mr. Agnelli.

He Loved Human Comedy

In the film, friends like Jean Pigozzi and Mr. Kissinger recall how Mr. Agnelli would call them in the early mornings, asking, “What’s new?” He loved gossip, the juicier the better.

He Knew How to Make an Entrance

Mr. Agnelli kept two helicopters fueled up on the lawn of his estate in Turin. One to go the mountains to ski, the other to the Mediterranean to go sailing. And he would arrive in port by jumping from his helicopter from 30 feet into the water and swimming to his yacht. He pulled the same helicopter-diving stunt when visiting friends, jumping into the swimming pools of their villas.

He Was Flashy, but Not Too Flashy

Though Mr. Agnelli was an avid boater who sailed the harbors of the French and Italian Rivieras, he was no oligarch out to show off the biggest boat. His famous yacht, Agneta , was an 80-foot jewel box with a Burmese-teak deck and possession-free staterooms. “All he had under there was a hammock for him and whichever girlfriend he was with,” Mr. Hooker said.

He Shed Inhibitions (and Clothes)

“For him, swimming naked in the ocean was the ultimate sense of freedom,” Mr. Hooker said. “He was always naked or with a towel around his waist on the boat.”

He Aged Like a Fine Wine

“Cary Grant was a much sexier man in ‘North by Northwest’ than he was in ‘Bringing up Baby,’” Mr. Hooker said. Likewise, Mr. Agnelli was more striking in his 50s and 60s, when his thick hair had gone white at the sides and his still-trim frame was sheathed in the double-breasted tailored suits of an industrial titan. It’s a reminder that you don’t need the rock-hard abs and waxy face of a 22-year-old to remain appealing. “His manners were like from another century,” Mr. Hooker said. “What was so alluring about him was his combination of exquisite, exquisite taste, combined with his restraint.”

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The “disputed treasure” of the Agnelli legacy. The Lawyer’s Boats

• October 4, 2022
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In the fierce Agnelli/Elkann battle pitting mother Margherita Agnelli against children John, Lapo, and Ginevra Elkann for the inheritance of Gianni and Marella Agnelli, the Avvocato’s boats have also entered the scene . The yachts’ involvement stems from the search for the alleged undeclared “treasure” that Margaret said penalized her in inheriting the estate left by her father.

Part of the treasure are the wonderful boats that Gianni Agnelli owned through foreign companies. What are they? We traced the lawyer’s passion for boats and sailing, revealed by his boatmaster Alfredo Alocci, who told the Sailing Newspaper a few years ago about his favorite places, recipes, wonderful yachts, anecdotes and whims of a man who loved the sea.

Gianni Agnelli, sailor. Boating with the Advocate

Gianni Agnelli is known to everyone . He is the man who has represented Italy better than any other in the modern era. Class, style, resourcefulness, brilliance, irony. But the Avvocato had a great passion besides Juventus: the sea and sailing. And he has passed on his passion to his nephew John Elkann, owner of that Maserati that is on the hunt for new sailing records with Giovanni Soldini.

His foreman, Alfredo Alocci, who followed him for 30 years in a delightful book “At Sea with the Lawyer,” and Mario Oriani, the founder of this newspaper who knew him well, tell about his seafaring passion, favorite places, boats, foods.

Here is what Alocci writes: “A great love that Gianni Agnelli had for the sea. ‘I’m coming,’ he would announce, and that perfect machine that were his sailors would start up, whatever the weather, whatever the hour. As soon as he had a free moment, the Advocate would call, have the boat prepared, and join him and then set sail into the open sea in search of clean, deep waters in which to swim. Even though the weather was not the best. Even though winter had recently ended. Sometimes alone, sometimes in the company of more or less distinguished guests, to whom he would occasionally play a few tricks.” Here are some little stories of his sailings, favorite places, and boats.

Gianni Agnelli’s boat anecdotes

In corfu anchovies and champagne.

Corfu, Palio Castrizza Bay. The Advocate boarded the Boston, which served as tender to the Capricia. “Wait for me here, I’ll be back shortly.” He returns after an hour, accompanied by a small group of people; some ladies are wearing very elegant dresses. “Tell the cook that we are having a party tonight . See what’s good and then let me know.” I report to the cook, who is quite displeased: no dinner was planned, the galley is almost empty.

Question, “Do you know how many there are?” “Not exactly, however, quite a handful, at a rough guess those left ashore are many more than those who have already gone up.” The cook, who is a Neapolitan, is bewildered: “Madonna, ch’agg’a fa? I don’t have anything….” He comes to the ground with me, talks to the Advocate. There is one hope; we have always found lobsters here. But the Advocate has another solution: “Those fishermen over there have the freshest anchovies. Get plenty of them and cook them all breaded and fried.” And the cook renounces his intention to make at least one cold pasta, because personal initiatives have never been fashionable here. I set a self-service style table, the cook fries for an hour, the Advocate orders champagne to be served chilled, ladies in long dresses hide their disgust and are forced to bring fish to their mouths with their hands. Anchovies and champagne .”

The bathroom in jeans

“What do you suggest: better to go toward Italy or toward Saint-Tropez? We moor toward the monastery on the island of Saint Honorat (Lerins Islands). There is some movement, but not excessive. Guests put on their costumes; the Advocate is shirtless but continues to wear jeans. He does not have a costume with him and asks if we have one. I offer him mine, but he does not accept it and communicates that he will bathe with his jeans. “Counsel, it will be quite uncomfortable.” “It’s certainly not the best. But it is cheaper.”

GALLERY – GIANNI AGNELLI’S BOATS

Lawyer Agnelli has owned some of the most beautiful boats in the world. Here is a complete review of the larger ones.

Engagement with the Swan

That morning in Calvi, the mugginess of summer is alleviated by a cool and tense mistral. With the wind blowing, with the Advocate at the helm, with the captain grumbling about the dangerousness of the maneuver, we sail out of the harbor, without even starting the engine. “Veer, orza poggia,” orders the Advocate. The wind pulls, and we notice a Swan rushing out of the Calvi roadstead with all the sail up and the bow straight over our stern. “Do you think they feel like competing with us?” the Advocate asks. “If they’re not mad at us, they’re mad at the wind. However, the fight is unequal, we are much faster,” replied the commander. The Advocate asks, “Are you willing to get a little wet?”

A pulse-pounding race begins . Increasing wind, spray, pure adrenaline. Until we hear the dry sound of a crash. It is the jib of the Swan that crashed into the sea. On board we see a great confusion, the Swan held back by the large sail cannot stay with its bow to the wind, traversed by the waves it rolls scary. “Counselor, don’t get too close. These might come at us,” the commander shouts. “Don’t worry, don’t worry,” he replies, as he brings himself upwind and then brakes the Capricia a few meters from the Swan. “Rather, ask if they need help.” The response is an eloquent gesture, a “Vaffa.” , in short. That puts a smile back on the Advocate’s face: “Good. With this wind today there’s fun to be had. Are you ready to tack? “.

Stranding in the Balearics

The Extra Beat sailboat is at anchor in Palm Bay; it is about 3 p.m. when I catch sight of the Lawyer leaning against the edge of the F100 (his speedboat, ed.) looking straight at us . Before long we will have him on board. We set sail and prepare with the mainsail already up: a very simple operation, especially if he does not participate in the maneuver. The speedboat approaches and in a flash he is up, rudder wheel in hand.

We begin to sail, edging into the bay, among the boats that are at anchor. He gets excited to pass by them until he almost touches them. Fun that lasts no more than ten minutes. We return to tacking near the shore. The risk factor increases a lot: the skipper reminds him that it’s time to spread out, the boat’s draft is about 6 meters, great care is needed. “ Don’t worry,” he replies. “I know these coasts by heart, I spent my youth there.” . The commander reminds him for the umpteenth time to spread out. But he continues until the boat takes a hit on the bulb and runs aground .

We immediately proceed to de-rigging operations, moving the boom all to one side and adding weights on the end so as to heel the boat as much as possible. In a few minutes the boat resumed sailing. The silence is broken by the Advocate, who wants to find a way to be right: “This is a spot where I had to pass without any problems, I know it too well. Maybe I understood what happened: they did some restoration work at the villa and threw some rubble into the sea. Yes, it can only have gone like this.” .

So Azure was born

Agnelli, with the complicity of Cino Ricci and the architect Vallicelli, in an antelucid phone call (he always woke up and woke up very early) with Prince Karim Aga Khan, founder and animator of the Porto Cervo Yacht Club, told him that it was time to try the great adventure of the America’s Cup (this is the early 1980s, ed.) aware of the difficulty of winning, but determined to participate. Was His Highness in? Karim immediately said yes . And so began, thanks to the two big guys, what was to be Operation Blue.

Agnelli loved being at the helm, and Cino Ricci, also in Azzurra’s day, knows this well, because he had to keep his escapades off Porto Cervo with Agnelli at the helm a secret from the other sponsors, breaking the pact that no one who was not part of the crew could go out on the boat, much less go to the helm. But how to say no to the Advocate?

How did Gianni Agnelli steer?

The Advocate cared that his boats were the fastest of all (German Frers, among others, knows a thing or two about that), but going him personally to the regatta was not even worth talking about. There were two or perhaps three reasons. The first is that the possibility of not winning was not covered in his sports code. The second, that he would definitely be at the helm. As always. And so the defeat would have been his anyway. The third that, in fact, when there was no wind, he was bored and on sea outings it was normal, indeed expected, for him to really escape the becalmedness so much so that the boat was always followed by a motor vehicle to take him ashore. In short, the Lawyer liked the wind with the screwy sails and the lurching boat.

Thus Stealth was born

The Lawyer’s dream was to break the Atlantic crossing record, confident that in the Ocean he would not miss the wind. The Extra Beat, from 1988, was a 36-meter maxi yacht that was supposed to spin “like a rocket.” It was beautiful, but he wanted more, so he asked German Frers for a means to go even faster and break Atlantic crossing records (with Extra Beat it was impossible) and suggested he use technology from America’s Cup boats. Thus was born a boat smaller than Extra Beat, 26 meters long, 36 meters mast, 7 meters wide.

Built in 1996, in England, all carbon fiber. Only the deck is covered with a thin layer of teak. He called it Stealth, the name for U.S. fighter bombers. Agnelli loved colorful sails (those on the Agneta were a revolutionary ochre) in years when boat sails were only strictly white. For the Stealth he wanted everything to be black, including the hull. Minus, the blanket!

Finally-where did Gianni Agnelli like to sail?

Agnelli loved the Mediterranean and had many favorite places, coincidentally among the most beautiful places in the “Mare Nostrum.” Here is a review of his favorite destinations.

CAP FERRAT, les Lerins, Eden Roc

A stone’s throw from Italy and Turin. As soon as he had a free moment he would go out for a swim and a sail. He then loved to drop anchor in the shelter of the Lerins Islands, not even a mile from Cannes roadstead. For lunch after a swim he would stop at Eden Roc, a restaurant with enchanting views, in Antibes.

ARLES AND SAINT-TROPEZ

In the heyday of Saint Tropez, in the 1960s/70s Agnelli was at home and liked to sail in the sheltered roadstead. Then by tender he went to the nearby Camargue and up the Rhone River to the Roman city of Arles.

CALVI AND CORSICA

Another great passion of the Advocate was Corsica. He would base in the lovely port of Calvi and then sail, especially when the Mistral rose.

THE BALEARICS, MAJORCA AND FORMENTERA

Another Mediterranean passion was the Balearic Islands. Favorite roadsteads: in Majorca, the large bay, in the northern part, of Formentor and in the extreme edge of the island of Formentera, the wonderful anchorage of Espalmador.

GREECE AND THE ISLAND OF ONASSIS

He preferred the western Mediterranean, but when he pushed into the Ionian Agnelli was a guest on the private island of Skorpios, then owned by the Onassis family.

CARIBBEAN, ANTIGUA

Memorable were his New Year’s Eve parties in the sailing paradise of Antigua.

Gianni Agnelli’s favorite recipe in the boat?

Gianni Agnelli would invent recipes to make on the boat, driving the ship’s cook crazy. Famous this dish, to be made strictly with what the crew caught.

Spaghetti all’Agnelli. urchins and seafood: limpets, grits, small mussels, sconcigli and so on with spaghetti aglio, olio e peperoncino and the addition of a glass of white wine. You heat the sauce over high heat and add the seafood, which will open with the heat. The flesh of the urchins is combined.

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The Autumn/Winter of The Patriarch: Gianni Agnelli

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Gianni Agnelli’s 55-knot custom speedboat sold at auction

RM Sotherby’s has auctioned off a custom 37ft LOA speedboat that was originally commissioned by the Italian billionaire and Fiat boss Gianni Agnelli.

A true thoroughbred, G Cinquanta sports a deep-vee wood-epoxy hull drawn by the legendary Renato ‘Sonny’ Levi, the sides of which are beautifully varnished, and exterior lines and cockpit detailing by Sergio Pininfarina, one of the all-time greats of the automobile industry. She was built at Cantiere Delta in Anzio, 40 miles south of Rome.

Those lines don’t deceive either. This boat is fast. Indeed, not long after her launch in 1968, an Italian yachting journalist commented that she was probably the perfect boat from which to watch offshore powerboat racing , in that she could not only be there at the start, but also get to the finish line in time to watch the winners arrive.

Her name is a composite; the G comes from Gianni and the 50 marks her original top speed, although now she is capable of around 55 knots because she was recently re-engined with four lightweight 8.0-litre BPM Vulcano V8s that in total deliver more than 1,400hp via straight shafts and four three-blade props.

The original four Vulcano V8s delivered around 1,280hp. The present set have just over 100 hours on them. Unusually her engines are located in two separate engine bays, one in front of the cockpit and the other behind. Beyond the replacement engines, she is in totally original condition.

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There are two cockpits. The aft one is all about the driver – just a single bolster seat, steering wheel and a super-macho old-school instrument console bristling with analogue dials and lots of lovely levers – four gear shifts for the left hand, four throttles for the right.

The forward cockpit is for the passengers – two bench seats and plenty of grab-rails – imagine the white knuckles that must have clung to them over the years!

Beneath the teak foredeck there’s also a vee-berth, basin and shower, as well as a head-locker. She is being sold by only her second owner, whose classic boat collection at one time also included the 1931 115ft J-Class Astra . He was gifted the boat by family friend Agnelli around 45 years ago while still in his 20s.

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Update: RM Sotherby’s announced today that G Cinquanta sold for €450,000.

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Shandor - the mother of all expedition yachts

Back in 1986, a 46 metre superyacht called Margaux Rose created waves in the superyacht world when she was launched. But it was not the spectacular style of her launch – complete with hot air balloon rising from her foredeck and helicopter alighting exactly on the H of the helipad – so much as the yacht itself. Not only did her layout flout convention but she also looked like a commercial ship. Most surprising of all, she had been conceived by Gianni Agnelli, chairman of Fiat, billionaire bon viveur and a man of supreme style, grace and sartorial splendour.

A passionate sailor, Agnelli is better remembered for his sailing yachts, among them Tiziana , Extra Beat and the inimitable Stealth , but he had the foresight to envisage and build what was probably the first example of today’s world-roaming expedition yachts – an innovation that created a new class of yacht specifically built for voyaging the world in safety, comfort and luxury.

For her design, Agnelli turned to renowned German naval architect Gerhard Gilgenast, while designer of the day Jon Munford undertook her interior design. Schweers, the shipyard chosen to build her, was also the best of its kind, specialising in naval gunships and long-range fishing trawlers.

Such an unprecedented yacht required a hardcore engine, and none other than a MAK would do. This marine version of a power station generator is designed to run continuously and is routinely fitted to single screw fishing trawlers and coastguard vessels. It is the engine that she still has to this day.

Equally over-specified were her bespoke hull – evaluation of thousands of commercial seagoing ships and freighters resulted in an efficient single screw design with the ability to withstand the worst possible weather conditions – and equipment, while her 100,000 litre fuel capacity ensured a 5,600 nautical mile range at 14 knots and, if she slowed down, up to 7,200 nautical miles. Indeed she has a trans-Pacific range, which translates into the potential ability to cross the Atlantic and back on one tank of fuel.

Unlike other yachts of her day, she stowed her tenders forward in a well deck, while instead of a lazarette, her stern contained a spacious dining room and a discotheque lounge on a slightly lower level that gave direct access to the bathing platform.

The well deck, or boat deck, is a special feature of this yacht that topped Agnelli’s list of requirements. He wanted crew, tenders and their work to be removed from guests, and so as well as tender and equipment stowage this area serves as access to the crew quarters and working areas in the bow, and is easily managed by the captain from the bridge. However, with the tenders launched and a live band positioned on the raised foredeck it makes a fantastic party area too.

Agnelli’s second requirement was an elevator which runs from the lower cabin deck to the sun deck. It is used by crew to speed up service but also allows less agile guests to move easily between decks. When the yacht is under way, the elevator locks into its lower position, thereby enhancing stability.

Gianni Agnelli was only the first in a small but illustrious line of owners – among them UK businessman and Labour peer Lord Alan Sugar, who named her Louisiana , and US media mogul and game showman Merve Griffin, who christened her The Griff . Her present owner bought her in 2003, naming her Shandor after a family dressage horse, and she has remained in family use ever since, cruising and circumnavigating the world as she was built to do.

Shandor still has her stern disco – a veritable party room that could also serve as a nightclub, cinema or even gymnasium. With its bathing platform access this area has been used as a cocktail reception area, most notably during the Monaco Grand Prix. The sliding doors to the adjacent dining room can be opened to enlarge the area even further.

Up from the split-level dining room/disco the bridge deck offers a more sedate living and dining area that opens aft through wide doors to a shaded aft deck, complete with a large alfresco dining table and comfortable seating around the edge.

The spacious owner’s suite is located on the main deck where it spans the full beam amidships with a separate en suite bathroom, dressing room and study aft.

Four further guest cabins are situated on the lower deck – two doubles and two twins with Pullmans, allowing for a party of up to 12 guests at a time.

The crew of 11 occupies the two-deck crew quarters, while the captain has his own cabin aft of the bridge. Also adjoining the bridge is the original radio room which lends itself to being converted into a dispensary, sick bay, office or staff cabin.

The sun deck itself is a unique area with a bar (often used for meals, too), a spa pool, sunloungers, massive cushioned areas and a forward observation area covered by parasols, where guests can dine or relax on comfortable banquettes.

Refits in 1994, 2000 and 2008 have kept Shandor in peak mechanical condition and increased her length to 49.95 metres. Her original interior has also been refreshed in a modern classic style by designers H2.

As well as being supremely seaworthy, Shandor is also a comfortable ride. She does not go much faster than 16 knots but at her optimum cruising speed of 13.5 knots she is stable and quiet. Although not ice-classed, Shandor ‘s Lloyd’s certification to travel in any waters was renewed at the time of her last refit in 2008. Shandor was sold again in 2012 – she was asking  €6,975,000.

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Agnelli: The Rules of the Game

By Sally Bedell Smith

Gianni Agnelli has always made his own rules. With his ravishingly elegant wife, Marella, at his side, he became the perfect Renaissance man—controlling the $50 billion Fiat empire while racing around the world as the daredevil playboy of la dolce vita . But how much longer can he stay ahead of his own game? Sally Bedell Smith reports in rare interviews with the Agnellis.

Gianni Agnelli pauses in the sunlit foyer of Villa Frescot, his hilltop house above Turin, in the heart of Northern Italy’s Piedmont region. He is dressed in a charcoal-gray Caraceni suit. His white button-down shirt has its collar-point buttons undone in the style of a prep-school boy late for chapel. On his wrist is the famous gold Cartier watch that he straps outside the cuff of his shirt—a look imitated by scores of friends and Agnelli wannabees. Incongruously, Agnelli also wears Tod’s sturdy lace-up shoes of brown suede with thick crêpe soles. Like the unbuttoned collar and the watch, the footwear is the latest of the studied fashion eccentricities that bring the eye to the wearer. Agnelli is too rich for mere quality.

Scattered around the foyer are a half-dozen paintings, among them a Géricault portrait of a blackamoor and two large Futurist canvases by Giacomo Balla and Carlo Carrà. The room offers a small glimpse into the larger-than-life life of Gianni Agnelli: seven exquisitely decorated homes (in Turin, Rome, Paris, New York City, Corsica, Saint-Moritz, and Villar Perosa, in the foothills of the Italian Alps); acres of manicured gardens; a vast art collection; fleets of cars, two yachts, two company helicopters, and seven company planes.

“What would you do if all this were taken from you? How would you cope?” I ask.

“Everything can be taken away when one disappears,” he says. “Everything is on loan in life—everything.” He dispenses the words like party favors. They are clever but of no real value. He knows that the question demands more, that it goes to the core of the image of Gianni Agnelli. “It all could easily have been taken away in 1947 or 1948,” he muses, recalling the years when Communists took over Eastern Europe and had a foothold in Italy. “I had that in my mind, but I was never desperate or besotted with the idea. I would have missed the life I was brought up in, the town, the people, as much as the things. I have seen so many people from Hungary and Yugoslavia sitting in New York, reconstructing their lives. What they miss is not so much their palaces or houses but the basic things. I would miss this Italy.”

Those people from Hungary and Yugoslavia are probably thinking, Ah, it is easy for him to say; spare us the existential claptrap and tell us about your $50 billion empire. Indeed, this Italy has been good to the Agnelli family, which controls one-quarter of the country’s stock market and touches virtually every aspect of Italian life, from cars and food to clothes and credit cards. Agnelli’s personal net worth is put at $1.7 billion.

The foundation of the Agnelli fortune is the Fiat conglomerate, 40 percent of which the family controls through a holding company. Founded by Agnelli’s grandfather ninety-two years ago, Fiat has some 300,000 employees in more than one thousand companies. Besides cars and trucks, Fiat produces missile components, chemicals, and assembly-line robots. It also owns insurance concerns, the newspaper La Stampa , and an interest in Rizzoli.

No industrialist in any other Western country approaches Agnelli’s position in Italy, where he is regarded as “the uncrowned king.” “He floats in another dimension,” said his niece Priscilla Rattazzi. Everyone from delivery boys to intimate friends calls him “1’Avvocato” (the lawyer). Trained in the law, Agnelli never practiced at the bar, but Italians love bestowing such honorifics on their icons.

Agnelli’s success as Fiat chief has less to do with his knowledge of manufacturing or marketing than with his place in the world. As uncrowned king, he operates on an equal footing with world leaders, and he has created an image of invincibility. Even when he has blundered, his personality—urbane, cultivated, invariably courteous—has preserved his reputation as one of the world’s top auto executives. “Anything Gianni says sounds profound and beautifully thought out,” remarked one rival automan. “But he’s not a visionary. He doesn’t think strategically about autos.”

What Agnelli has is a brilliant political gift, the ability to use his contacts to create ideal conditions for Fiat. “He knows his way around, how much to flatter someone, how to talk to the prime minister,” said one admirer. Agnelli’s deft maneuvering has both attracted lucrative government subsidies and repelled unwanted competitors. Ford Motor Company executives still cannot figure which political levers he pulled in 1986 to override the American automaker’s bid for the state-owned Alfa Romeo company.

Agnelli stands at the apex of international society, sought by climbers on two continents. For decades he has been an infamous playboy, with girlfriends too numerous to count, including actresses Anita Ekberg and Hedy Lamarr, a string of Italian princesses, fashion models, and socialites. A true libertine, Agnelli has been known to give his amorous adventures an unusual twist. Once, he brought a young girl from Antibes back to his Côte d’Azur estate and pretended he was the gardener.

“Gianni Agnelli excites women,” explained Taki Theodoracopulos, the writer, who has been his friend since the 1950s. “He has power, he is very brave, extremely romantic. When he is not thinking of business or art, he thinks of women.”

Most recently, the jet set has conjured up a serious flirtation with Susan Gutfreund, wife of the chairman of Salomon Brothers. But Agnelli dismisses the suggestion as “New York nonsense. I am a friend of John’s, and now and then have fun with Susan, and that’s all.” “She amuses him, but she is not on that track,” said Diane Von Furstenberg, the former wife of Agnelli’s nephew Egon.

At Agnelli’s side for nearly forty years has stood his elegant wife, Marella, a paragon of quiet dignity and strength. Truman Capote once observed that the charm of Gianni and Marella Agnelli “has a pleasantly astringent, realistic flavour, a taste that kindles a glow but also touches the intelligence.” Along with Babe Paley and Gloria Guinness, Marella Agnelli was one of Capote’s original “swans,” revered by the writer as much for her beauty as for the artistry with which she shaped her life, even amid heartbreak. “I knew Gianni would come and go, but I knew he would always come back,” she says today without the least trace of self-pity. “Who was the wife of Ulysses? Penelope? I was like that.”

No one is better equipped to appreciate her style than her husband, who places the highest premium on appearances. “I like beautiful things that are well done,” he says. “I even believe aesthetics are like ethics. Something that is beautiful is ethical, and unethical things aren’t beautiful—from tax dodging to doing things in hiding.”

By Kase Wickman

By Chris Murphy

By Bess Levin

Both Agnellis have strong ties to America, where they own a Park Avenue apartment filled with Matisses and where their friends include the Henry Kissingers, the David Rockefellers, and Katharine Graham. Gianni’s maternal grandmother, Jane Allen Campbell, the daughter of a linseed-oil manufacturer, was born in Orange, New Jersey. Marella’s mother came from Peoria, Illinois, where her father’s family owned a distillery.

Agnelli projects an air of carefree grace. “Doing things without giving the impression of suffering is a question of good manners,” he explains. “To let people think you are carrying a huge weight is an undeveloped-world approach to life.” Yet for all his insouciance, Agnelli is under growing pressures these days. After a lifetime of easy success, he has begun to confront limits in his personal and his business affairs.

Like auto manufacturers around the world, Fiat has seen its profits plummet, from $3.2 billion in 1989 to $1.9 billion in 1990. The company faces threats from Japanese automakers eager to increase their presence in Italy, and from growing competition among European automakers after trade barriers drop in the new united European market in 1992. It also confronts a challenge in Eastern Europe, where Fiat has pledged to expand operations to forestall a preemptive strike by the Japanese.

Fiat still symbolizes Italian industry, but behind Agnelli hovers a small group of aspiring princes—hotshot entrepreneurs such as Carlo De Benedetti in computers and Silvio Berlusconi in television. None of them dare aspire to be the uncrowned king, but all are jockeying to fill the vacuum he will inevitably leave.

Of greater concern, Agnelli faces the possible end of his family’s dynasty at Fiat. When he retires as expected in five years, at age seventy-five, his successor as Fiat chairman will be his brother Umberto, thirteen years his junior. A smart, capable businessman who helps run Fiat day to day, Umberto is a counterpoint to his older brother. He is practical and accessible, yet he lacks the strength and magnetism of the Avvocato.

Gianni Agnelli knows, however, that after Umberto he cannot pass the Fiat reins to the next generation as his grandfather did to him. His only son, Edoardo, thirty-seven, was arrested last year in Africa for heroin possession. Although he was acquitted, Edoardo was placed in therapy. Overseeing his son’s rehabilitation, Agnelli has had to come to grips with being a father. “My son is not a businessman,” he says. “Does that disappoint you?” I ask. “No, what I hope is that he is happy. I’m not sure being a businessman makes one so happy. It is not a dream. It is a duty.”

Agnelli is habitually restless, his plans are constantly in flux. Associates and friends learn to live by his clock, ready to adapt to the whims of his schedule. Proximity to Agnelli is life on the edge. It can also mean being left behind in an airport.

“He wants to be where he is not,” explained his longtime friend Prince Nicolò Pignatelli. “If he goes to where he has a house, he doesn’t take a suitcase,” recalled another old friend, “but if he goes someplace else, he takes his valet and a small suitcase with only a few things. Remember, he never goes anywhere for very long. I have been to Africa with him for a half-hour, when he discovered it was too hot, and we were back at his home in the Alps in two hours. So you go someplace with summer clothes and end up in a place where you need winter clothes.”

Mindful of the hazards, I crowded the first five days of my trip to Europe on the Agnelli trail with appointments. After the designated day for Agnelli, I left the schedule blank.

The door to the chairman’s office on the eighth floor of Fiat headquarters in Turin is midway down a wide corridor, indistinguishable from the doors of other Fiat executives. Inside, the surroundings are Spartan, with functional wooden furniture identical to his subordinates’.

Agnelli’s ruggedly handsome face—which can raise newsstand sales in Italy as much as 10 percent when it appears on a magazine cover—has been neither tightened nor sculpted to obscure his seventy years. The skin is tanned and weather-beaten, etched with spidery wrinkles. The pale-blue eyes are softer than expected. Under heavy lids, his gaze seems almost dreamy. His nose is aquiline, his brilliant white hair brushed back.

He keeps trim by exercising vigorously and eating sparingly (tea for breakfast; a salad, an egg, and a glass of beer for lunch; a dinner that might include risotto with scampi). “At the Agnellis’,” said Countess Marina Cicogna, an old friend, “the food is served exquisitely, but there is very little of it.” First-time passengers on Fiat planes are amazed that Agnelli serves only mineral water in paper cups.

Agnelli has a pronounced limp, the result of an auto accident forty years ago that shattered his right leg in seven places, rendering it virtually useless. Though he can neither run nor even take a long walk, he won’t use a cane, and he has gone to some lengths to transform his disability into an asset—skiing pell-mell down mountains with his bum leg encased in a steel-and-leather brace, driving at top speed while working three pedals with one foot. “If anything, his character has shaped that leg,” remarked Nicky Pignatelli. “It is a miracle he has managed to keep it stuck on.” For years, when he would inadvertently step on nails or lit cigarettes, he would fail to notice the wounds until they became infected.

Agnelli and I talked for three and a half hours as the sky darkened over Turin, and the next day he sent me off to visit his family estate at Villar Perosa (“My grandfather was born there, and it is where I will be buried”) and the cavalry school at nearby Pinerolo, which Agnelli, his father, and his grandfather all attended. “Those valleys and that school are where it all began for me,” he explained.

Agnelli’s forty-five-room rococo villa of creamy stucco has a commanding view of the Alps. The gardens were designed by Marella Agnelli and Russell Page, the famous English landscape gardener. The architect Gae Aulenti, who designed the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, did the timbered pool house. The interior of the main house is decorated in grand style—walls covered in green silk, long galleries of painted chinoiserie panels—but the upholstery is charmingly shredded on several antique chairs.

One image lingers: the small terrace, carpeted with grass as fine as a putting green. Agnelli’s favorite spot, the terrace has been carefully arranged with two cushioned chairs and two small tables. All is in order, the staff of twelve at attention, should Agnelli suddenly alight from his helicopter at the landing pad on the other side of the trees, ready for a quick lunch.

The following morning he phoned at 8:30. He had already been up for three hours, reading newspapers and doing business on the phone. We would meet, as I requested, at Villa Frescot for an hour to tour his art collection, which one expert in Paris termed “perfectly eclectic, totally instinctive . . . each object has its place in the collection, and each painting is of exceptional quality.”

Villa Frescot sits near the crest of La Collina, the hill overlooking Turin that rises up from the banks of the Po River. At the guardhouse, four security men armed with pistols and dressed in identical navy-blue jerseys waved as they opened the mechanized gate.

Inside, Louis XVI tables mingle with rustic wicker chairs in elegant rooms designed by Renzo Mongiardino. The wallcovering, draperies, and upholstery are made of a floral cotton fabric, a design Marella created from a peasant handkerchief. “Their houses are incredibly sophisticated,” said Marina Cicogna, “filled with beautiful things, but not showy. The most flamboyant things Gianni owns are his paintings.”

It is a dazzling collection: two huge Canalettos of Venice; a Géricault of a Liberian man (“This is the smiling face of liberation—you see his liberated stare,” commented Agnelli); a Joshua Reynolds of an Indian servant; a portrait of Géricault by David; a Corot nude; a series of painted numerals by Robert Indiana; a torso by George Segal; a Kees van Dongen portrait of a dance-hall girl.

Agnelli keeps three large paintings by Francis Bacon propped against the wall in his basement screening room. Two are studies of popes, their smeared faces cruel and compelling. The third is a man sitting sideways in a chair, his head twisted forward. “There you’ve got the perspective of a box where you can go mad,” said Agnelli. “He looks mad, but then not so mad after all. I like the way he looks out at you.” Agnelli said he considers Bacon “the greatest twentieth-century painter, once Picasso and de Chirico died.” At one point he kept the Bacons in his bedroom in Turin. When Marina Cicogna asked him how he could sleep with such grotesque images, she recalled, “he just laughed. He rather likes the extremes in that way.” Agnelli himself once explained, “Even if after some time the presence of a painting bothers me, and if it is a troubling work, such as a Schiele or a Bacon, I keep it very close for one year, six months. When I like a painting, I keep it very close to me.”

So why are the Bacons relegated to the basement now? “I like my pictures, but I move them around,” he said, “from one house to another.” Rather like their owner.

At the end of the hour, Agnelli pondered my next request: a talk with Marella at their home in Saint-Moritz. She had been ill with the flu, and he was planning to join her over the weekend. “Keep in touch,” he said. “Maybe we can arrange a visit on Saturday.”

Three days later, the phone awakened me at 7:30 in my Saint-Moritz hotel room. “I have organized something you’ll find amusing,” said Agnelli. “In an hour my old ski man will pick you up and take you to the Cresta Run.” Agnelli speaks impeccable, Oxford-accented English in a soothing baritone. Every few words, there is a sharp inflection, like a hammer driving in a nail, which gives his talk a rhythm that is highly contagious.

The Cresta Run is a winding, icy course three-quarters of a mile long where thrill seekers have been hurtling down a mountainside on small steel sleds since the late nineteenth century. Five men have died on the run. “After the war,” Agnelli told me, “we’d stay up all night, and we’d go ride the skeleton bobsleds at seven in the morning. It is terribly cold and terribly fast. You can go as much as eighty miles an hour on the blue ice.”

For this outing I had the company not only of Romano, Agnelli’s ski instructor for twenty-six years, but also of two of Agnelli’s grandchildren, Lapo, thirteen, and Jaki, fifteen, the eldest sons of Agnelli’s daughter, Margherita. With their politely inquisitive manner and adolescent lankiness, the two boys were full of charm. “What happens when your grandfather arrives?” I asked Jaki. “Everything changes when Nonno comes,” he said. “You do everything at the last moment.”

Back in the hotel, I found a message to call Marella. We would meet at noon, she said, at Chesa Alcyon, the Agnelli chalet in the exclusive hamlet of Suvretta, a few miles above the town of Saint-Moritz. “Suvretta is a little nightmare,” Marella cheerfully explained. “All the houses are so ugly”—including her own, she said, which “is cozy inside, but it was a little monster when we bought it twenty-five years ago.”

From the road, Chesa Alcyon looks deceptively small. It has four levels connected by an elevator, and is carved into the mountain, an intricate network of rooms and corridors, much of it designed by Aulenti in recent years. There are no fewer than twenty-five internal phone numbers linking everything from the gymnasium to the laundry. Two butlers quietly moved from room to room. Each wore a black coat, white shirt, black tie, and gray pants.

The art runs to Klimt, Schiele, Kirchner. The décor is uncomplicated—big tables of blond wood, baskets filled with begonias, red lacquer bookcases, brass table lamps with round paper shades, sofas covered in nubby lamb’s wool.

Marella was sitting in a wicker armchair. Her posture is perfect, but her manner is easy. She is tall and rangy, with a narrow, angular face, thin and fine-boned. She has salt-and-pepper hair, cut short and brushed back from her face. Her lightly freckled skin is almost translucent, her brown eyes wide and expressive. The famous long neck was covered by a dark-pink ribbed turtleneck under a loose pale-pink sweater. She wore red nylon ski pants, red ribbed knee socks, and red suede shoes with embroidered flowers. “She has always been chic,” said one old friend, “even in a straight skirt and blouse with the sleeves rolled up.”

Asked about her reputation as one of the world’s most beautiful women, she had a lightning retort: “No. Never. Not even when I was twenty. That is why probably I give myself a lot of trouble to be elegant. I didn’t like especially the image of myself, so I tried through elegance to project an image I liked more than the natural one. It is compensation.”

Marella’s English is accented in the aristocratic cadences of her native Florence. She trills her *r’*s, occasionally struggles for the right English word and then flutters comfortably to a French phrase. She creates intimacy with her voice, which is musical and expressive, lightened by a ready laugh.

At the end of an hour, a butler announced, in Italian, that the Countess Cicogna had arrived. “ E l’ Avvocato? ” asked Marella. He had arrived too, said the butler. “It seems everyone is upstairs and waiting,” said Marella, smiling pleasantly. We agreed to meet again later in the day.

As we settled in for our second conversation, she mentioned that her husband had gone to the airport. “He came and went?” I asked. “Yes,” she said with a grin. “He came and went. He wanted to see some people here. But then he said the snow is no good anymore, and he has a football match to see tomorrow. So he called, and they said the airport may be shut tomorrow because of snow, so, pffft, he goes.”

“I have always been a devoted husband,” said Gianni Agnelli. He had turned pensive, looking out his office windows and absently spinning the propeller of a model plane on his desk. “I am and always was. But if I would pretend I have always been a faithful husband, that would be a lie. I really loved everything beautiful in life. And a beautiful woman is the most beautiful thing of all. There is nothing more beautiful than a beautiful woman. My relationship with Donna Marella has always been very good.”

To Agnelli, this is a conveniently old-fashioned view of upper-class marriage, Italian-style: the steadfast wife, multiple mistresses, and never a whisper of divorce. “For Gianni, the woman means the conquest,” Marella once said.

For aspiring girlfriends, just the possibility of some time with Agnelli has been sufficient enticement. “He would say to a woman, ‘Come meet me in Milan,’ but she would have to buy her own ticket,” said an old friend. At one point Agnelli liked to leave a suitcase in a comer of the bedroom, “a simple way,” according to biographer Enzo Biagi, “to make one understand that even fun has its limits, that it must be consumed rapidly, and that appointments must be respected.”

Once, in the early days of Gianni and Marella’s marriage, he became smitten with a honey-haired beauty named Princess Laudomia Hercolani. “That is entirely out of the discussion,” she told me. “We have been friends and that’s all.” Still, friends insist that Agnelli was romantically involved with her for several months, during the time Marella was pregnant with her second child. “It was a moment of great tension,” recalled a friend.

Finally a relative of Agnelli’s mother sat down with Marella to put the matter in perspective. “He will not only not marry her,” the relative told her, “he will never leave you.”

But such reassurances offered little comfort to Marella over the years. “Marella has had one great love in her life: Mr. Agnelli,” said one of her friends. “It has been like something leading her in life. It has been unwavering. She has suffered a lot. She has had the total disease of jealousy. Never for one minute was she understanding about his cavorting around.”

Marella Agnelli fidgeted a bit with her left earlobe when the question came up, but gazed directly and frankly. “I saw myself being so jealous for a long time. One starts to elaborate and try to understand and figure out why. Where’s the danger? Why find some reason for spoiling everything, especially yourself, in fits of rage and despair? One realizes it was not worth-while; the things were of very little consequence and always very short.”

Even if the rules of the game had permitted Marella to indulge herself as her husband has done, “she doesn’t have the temptations of Gianni,” said one friend. “There isn’t any hell in Marella.” Still, Marella could not resist one cryptic aside. “In everybody’s life there is a brief encounter,” she said. “In yours?” I asked. “In everybody’s,” she replied.

If you are an Agnelli, you stop short of full revelation. “They are very royal in that way,” said Marina Cicogna. “In the Agnelli family, there is never any talk of private matters.”

Gianni Agnelli sets the tone for such circumspection. Even friends of long standing wonder about his feelings. “He is very stoic,” said Nicky Pignatelli. “He endures physical and moral pain, and withstands pressures. I have never seen him show emotion.”

The only lapse anyone can recall occurred several years ago, when Marella was threatened with cancer. After her exploratory surgery revealed no malignancy, recounted biographer Marie-France Pochna in Agnelli: L’Irrésistible, a relieved Avvocato “was seen shedding tears”—an extraordinary sight.

“I don’t like people who display their feelings, who scream and squeak and make a great case,” Agnelli told me. “It doesn’t look nice. It is a matter of the way one disciplines oneself, how one builds oneself. Some people behave absolutely marvelously under pressure. But you also see people who are looking for sympathy. I don’t like that very much.”

“Gianni has great consideration for Marella,” said Nicky Pignatelli. “He won’t express it, but he might show it in a strange way. Once, I said, ‘That Marella, she’s really a rock, isn’t she?’ He just looked at me. The way he looked was more than saying anything.”

Still, it was difficult for Marella to adjust to a man so undemonstrative. “It bothered me enormously when I wasn’t so sure of myself,” said Marella. “But when I started realizing there was a lot under the surface, it didn’t bother me anymore. Underneath he is a kind and generous person with a lot of understanding for the difficulties of life.”

Agnelli’s mask of impassivity is a classic defense. When faced with problems or controversy, he brushes them off. “If you don’t let feelings get hold of you, they wash away,” commented one friend. “He doesn’t let them run too deep.” The consequence, however, is a superficiality in most of his relationships.

Neither business associates nor friends can recall seeing Agnelli lose his temper. “He has a way of putting problems which would make him angry on a second plane,” said his friend Jas Gawronski, a commentator on Italian television. A furrow above Agnelli’s Roman nose offers the only clue.

By its very restraint, Agnelli’s displeasure can be intimidating. Taki recalled the time he and the Avvocato were sailing off Sardinia. During dinner one evening, Taki made some disparaging remarks about one of Agnelli’s sisters. Later, when Taki was asleep, Agnelli came into his room and woke him up by flicking his finger against Taki’s shoulder. “I hear you were very tough on Countess Brandolini,” said Agnelli. “That was all,” recalled Taki, adding, “That was enough.”

Agnelli’s legendary restlessness helps him defuse annoyance before it surges into an angry boil. “I hate to be stuck,” said Agnelli. “I’ve got such a lot of things I do for duty—endless meetings where the same things are repeated again and again. Off duty, I just hate to have to go to a dinner and sit at a table for two hours.”

Or, for that matter, to read a book to its end or sit through a movie. “Most often at a movie, when you see one hour you can see the setting, the quality of the directing, and the actors,” he said. “I don’t want to see the end. I know enough to see how everything is doing.” In recent months he has walked out of Dances with Wolves, Green Card, and Ghost. Good-Fellas , however, proved an irresistible exception. “I stayed through that,” said Agnelli. “I love all those Italian characters. I know them so well.”

Quickly, mischievously, a smile danced across his face. The Agnelli charm had hit cruising speed. “When I first met Gianni,” Henry Kissinger recalled, “I said to myself, Me you are not going to charm.” But of course he did, as he does everyone who spends any time with him.

Agnelli’s charm is innate, not learned, fortified by a ready wit. For all his power, he avoids pomposity. A display of conceit would be the height of poor taste. He has never been accused of talking down to anyone; he always sits in the front seat of his silver Fiat Croma, next to the driver—or he switches places and drives himself. With chauffeurs as well as countesses, he is utterly at ease. On his boat, he often walks around wearing only a towel, and once a paparazzo caught him standing naked on deck. The caption on the photo, published in the German magazine Stern: “The man who has everything.”

“If I am at his house and he is having his bath, I’ll go in and talk with him,” said Marina Cicogna. “We’ll chat while he’s washing. It is terrifically discreet, although he could just as easily knock and walk right in while you are dressing, sit on an armchair and talk. He is very cozy that way.”

Friends who have known Agnelli since boyhood insist he has hardly changed. “In public, he has to keep up a front,” said Nicky Pignatelli. “But in private he is as simple as could be.” Observed another old friend, “He is not going to say he is a self-made man or a very clever man. He will say if he had been born without money maybe he’d have been a maître d’hôtel or a croupier. He has no illusions. He is not pretending he is better than he is. He is clear about how lucky in life he has been. If there is any merit, it is to have taken advantage, and not to have lost it, as so many others have.”

If he had been a maître d’, he doubtless would have ended up owning the place. “He is an incredibly civilized man with an incredibly civilized intellect; there are lots of flashes and sparks,” said one New York acquaintance. Around Fiat, the executives refer to his “monkey curiosity,” an insatiable urge to be au courant. “He reminds me of President Kennedy,” said Katharine Graham. “He vacuum-cleans your mind.”

“ Dimmi tutto [tell me all],” he will murmur to his friends when he sits down to relax after a day filled with business briefings. “If you know some very good stories about someone and then see how they behave, that can make it amusing,” said Agnelli. “For example, if you know a husband is being cuckolded and he doesn’t know it, it can be great fun if you are watching him at a dinner party.”

“ Le diable boiteux —the lame devil—we used to call him,” said a longtime Agnelli observer, noting the darker aspect of the Avvocato’s charm. He is something of a rogue who captures people in a swirl of activity. Once in the Agnelli orbit, they have little choice but to go along—sometimes against their better judgment. “Everything has to be done with the maximum of danger and speed,” said one old friend. “If other people are afraid, they are sissies.”

Agnelli delights in testing the limits of life. “Some people feel certain emotions,” he explained. “I don’t.” He pulled an unfiltered cigarette from a shallow rectangular silver box on his desk. After lighting it, he took only two drags before crushing it in an ashtray. “Suppose there is some bomb outside,” he continued. “Some people are affected, but to me it doesn’t matter.”

“Why is that?” I asked. “It is a combination of things,” he replied. “One doesn’t care more than so much, and certain emotions are very exciting. Suppose you are going to your hotel and somebody shoots and misses you. It is much more fun than if nobody shoots at you at all. It is much more exhilarating than just a normal, banal day.”

Based on the evidence, this is not idle braggadocio. Some years ago, the Italian publisher Dino Fabbri was riding with Agnelli in his helicopter over the Mediterranean. As they eased down toward Agnelli’s yacht, the Avvocato suddenly jumped out. When Fabbri asked Agnelli later why he had leapt into the water from a height of 120 feet, Agnelli protested that the distance had actually been much smaller. “He jumped because he felt like it,” said Fabbri.

“He is brave to the point of recklessness, that is true,” said his younger sister Suni, Gianni’s closest sibling in age as well as temperament. Like her brother, she has a strong, handsome face and white hair. She is a big woman, with an iron handshake and a brisk manner. No one except Marella understands him as well as Suni, who talks to him nearly every day.

“He has a romantic view of what a man should be like,” observed one old friend. “He should be a sportsman, have vision, keep his face up, never run away, and have three women rather than one. There is something Byronic about him. Something is always calling him ahead.”

Over the years, Agnelli’s exploits have preoccupied the dozens of friends and family members in the Agnelli entourage known as the “ gruppetto .” “They are afflicted with Agnellitis—love of Agnelli—wanting to be with him, to be like him,” said one friend in New York. Bright and clever, invariably good-looking, they are not around so much to flatter as to amuse him, to protect him from dreaded boredom. Sometimes they even pick up the check; in monarchical fashion, Agnelli carries no money.

“I look for friends with total loyalty,” he said. “Being with people of my generation is like being the same nationality. You have done the same things, felt the same emotions. The intimacy is total.” But, he added, “I have a lot of young friends, because a lot of my contemporaries have become rather boring. They love being old and feeling they don’t need to bother, so they retire. Young people have a greediness for life.” Besides, he said with a sly smile, “you have to have some friends who will tell you you are gaga. If you are the same age, you will both get gaga slowly together.”

Being wealthy helps too. One longtime friend said he objects to “the snobbism of Agnelli. He is too impressed that Niarchos could spend $50 million on a painting.” But another old friend took a more philosophical view: “People with a lot of money have something in common. They can discuss their jet engines. He doesn’t necessarily choose rich people as intimate friends, but people of a certain level treat each other like people in the same regiment.”

Keeping up with Agnelli can be difficult. If someone wanted to buy a yacht that was beyond his means, Agnelli would not discourage it. “He would allow people to do what was amusing for him without caring what was good for them,” said one close Agnelli observer. “He wouldn’t say, ‘No, you cannot afford that ticket to Nice.’ He doesn’t stay awake at night thinking about his effect on people or thinking about other people’s problems.”

Some friends have dropped out from sheer exhaustion, and others have become disenchanted. “What is intimidating is his lack of patience and lack of attention if you say stupid things,” said Taki. “There is a lack of human contact. It is all quick quick quick.”

Whether in the boardroom or the drawing room, Agnelli hates anything long-winded. “You have to be pretty concentrated to get his attention,” said Nicky Pignatelli, who worked for Fiat in the early 1980s. “You can’t fuss around. You have to have it complete and in capsule form, getting quickly to the punch line.” Sometimes, Agnelli pretends not to understand only to force his interlocutor to strip a subject to the essentials.

Even his high-powered friends hold Agnelli in awe. “In Italy I go to a football game with him,” said Henry Kissinger, “and my prestige comes from standing with him, not the other way around.” Said Jas Gawronski, “What he has to say is more interesting than what one has to say to him. He has a fuller life and more interests. He is rather generous. He shares his views and information.”

Many in his entourage feel diffident about ruffling Agnelli’s mood with their problems. They understand what they call his “cult of aesthetics.” Since he never complains, he expects the same from those around him.

Yet when Taki was in financial trouble, Agnelli lent him money—“a lot,” said Taki. “He will do something, and he will die if you thank him,” said Kissinger. “He would deny he did it and make it look as if it just happened.”

He might even laugh it off. “Even in a very serious discussion,” said his sister Suni, “he will see a little detail that makes it amusing.” Agnelli has armed himself with a mocking humor that can be cynical and mordant at its worst, clever and ironic at its best. “It is part of the style,” said an old friend, “little cuts and asides.” When anyone tries to jab him in return, said Lupo Rattazzi, one of Agnelli’s favorite nephews, “he doesn’t like it. He is quick to change the subject.”

It has been said that Agnelli “speaks in quotes.” “He lives in great fear of saying anything banal,” said a friend. “He always wants to top himself.”

Because his wit can be so easily misinterpreted, Agnelli has learned to muffle it in public. Once, in an interview for 60 Minutes, Morley Safer asked Agnelli what his epitaph would be. “What a waste of money and time!” Agnelli cracked. When Agnelli’s mentor, the banker André Meyer, saw the program, he scolded Agnelli: “Don’t you do or say things like that! The American people are not made for those jokes.”

So Agnelli saves his ammunition for friends and family. “Are you married or unmarried or divorced?” he would needle Priscilla Rattazzi, his thrice-married niece (most recently to American media baron Chris Whittle), who took it in stride as a “light note in a tragic situation.”

His children, Margherita and Edoardo, were less resilient. Marella once observed that they suffered from their father’s indifference. “He was not very interested to be a father,” Marella told me. “Paternal attention is not very Latin. I think Latin men are so full of charm and intelligence, but there is no man who is more narcissistic than a Latin man.”

When Agnelli wasn’t ignoring his children, he made fun at their expense. A spirited fighter, Margherita rebelled as a teenager and moved into a shack in the garden of their Rome apartment. One day she appeared in Agnelli’s living room with her head completely shaved.

“She thought she was going to impress me,” recalled Agnelli. “I absolutely didn’t notice at all, didn’t say a word. She was disappointed. They always think they can shock you.” Several years later, Margherita married the writer Alain Elkann and moved to New York. Today, at thirty-three, she is married for the second time and the mother of eight children. “She lives like a nurse,” said Agnelli with a philosophical shrug. “I never see her without a child in her arms. It is her whole life, not just her priority.”

In virtually every way, Edoardo Agnelli is his father’s opposite: frail, athletically awkward, and sensitive. When Edoardo was only eight years old, he annoyed his father by refusing to dive off a boat into the Mediterranean. Agnelli had neither the patience nor the empathy to understand Edoardo, whose fragile ego collapsed under the Avvocato’s barbs.

Marella saw her son as a soul mate but could offer him little solace. For too many years, as one old friend put it, “she was occupied full-time with the problems of the relationship with her husband.” Her two brothers, Carlo, a newspaper publisher, and Nicola, a documentary filmmaker, partly filled the breach. For a time Edoardo even lived in an apartment in his uncle Carlo’s house in Rome.

As the gulf between father and son widened, Agnelli had “difficulty in controlling his boredom” when Edoardo called on the telephone, according to Marie-France Pochna. Agnelli would “hold the receiver at a distance, register distractingly what his son was telling him while doing something else, content to punctuate the monologue with a few intermittent signs while waiting for the conversation to end.”

After dropping out of Princeton, Edoardo sought refuge in a religious community in Italy, dabbled in Oriental mysticism, and started working for Juventus, the Agnelli-owned soccer team. In 1986, he made a widely publicized speech about his spiritual beliefs, including an “opposition to materialism.” In later interviews with Italian journalists, Edoardo proclaimed his fitness to take over Fiat and his wish that his father would “prepare for his succession in the correct manner.”

Gianni Agnelli made no public reply. Instead, Fiat president Cesare Romiti appeared on national television to say that Edoardo had “no role in any part of Fiat.” A year later, Agnelli disclosed that his brother Umberto would be the next in line.

Spurned by his father and the family business, Edoardo became interested in anti-nuclear and environmental issues and traveled to Africa. When Kenyan officials arrested him last August for heroin possession, he had to share a cell with common criminals until he was released on bail.

According to friends, Gianni Agnelli was stricken with shame and did not appear in public. Neither he nor Marella went to Africa, although two of Edoardo’s cousins, Giovannino Agnelli and Lupo Rattazzi, flew down with a clutch of family lawyers. By October, Edoardo had been acquitted, and his most loyal friends insisted the police had framed him to extort “ransom” from his powerful family.

Once Edoardo returned to Italy, said one Agnelli relative, Gianni “made a huge effort to make up.” He installed Edoardo in a house next to Villa Frescot in Turin and closely monitored his psychiatric care. It was not the first time, his father conceded, that Edoardo had been treated for drug problems. “I know my son very very very well,” he told me. “He is not a drug addict. He is a terribly sensitive person and terribly emotional. When he is put under stress, he is capable of taking drugs. It calms him down. So he must be protected and not be faced with strong emotions.”

Throughout Edoardo’s treatment, Agnelli would visit him every morning for a quarter-hour and debrief the doctors about their sessions. “Now it is a question of constructing a life where he is not in danger,” said Agnelli. “That is difficult.” While not admitting his failure as a parent, Agnelli did concede, “I’m not a great pedagogue. I am more inclined to let people do what they want.”

“Do you feel guilty about your children?” I asked him. “Probably,” he replied, cracking his knuckles. “One could have done more, but I’m not sure how one could have changed things. My grandchildren—I take them and talk and laugh with them and we go to museums and movies. I know how to do that. But I am no good at educating.”

Gianni Agnelli’s sprawling family ran to extremes, from the strict, almost Prussian military tradition of the Piedmontese haute bourgeoisie to the libertinism of Roman aristocrats. His grandfather Giovanni had been a cavalry lieutenant before he and a small group of investors founded Fiat (Fabbrica Italiana di Automobili Torino) in 1899. “He wanted to do something better than become a general,” said Agnelli. “To be an entrepreneur was much better than to pass one’s life in the army, which was a bit too dull.”

Giovanni organized his business like a regiment and forged shrewd political alliances that helped his business. During the First World War, Fiat made a fortune producing vehicles for the military. When Mussolini began his rise, Giovanni lined up as an early supporter. Il Duce rewarded him by appointing him a senator for life.

Giovanni’s wife, Clara, came from a bourgeois Florentine family and was known, Suni Agnelli wrote in a memoir, for cutting remarks. “My grandmother always sees the worst of everybody and, with an amusing and nasty sense of humor, immediately points it out.” After her daughter, Aniceta, died delivering her fifth child, Clara Agnelli was “shattered,” wrote Suni. “From then on . . . she spent most of her time in bed.”

The imperious Senator was a stem patriarch who ran roughshod over his remaining child, Edoardo. Trained at the Pinerolo cavalry school like his father, Edoardo took charge of the family’s ball-bearing business and Sestriere, a ski resort in the Italian Alps built by the Senator.

At a bridge party in the Palazzo Barberini in Rome, Edoardo fell in love with Virginia Bourbon del Monte, a lithe young woman with a heart-shaped face and curly auburn hair. She was the daughter of a Roman aristocrat, Prince Carlo di San Faustino, and a spirited redhead known to all as Princess Jane. Jane Campbell had been brought to Italy from America as a girl when her father died after losing his fortune in the Wall Street crash of 1893.

Jane had married Carlo Bourbon del Monte over the objections of his family, who sensibly sniffed a fortune hunter. The couple settled in the family’s home in the Palazzo Barberini, where she established a legendary salon. “She gave parties morning to night and ran through his money,” one distant relative recalled. “That was infra dig in Roman society.” Prince Carlo had a love affair, prompting Princess Jane to leave him for two years before she forgave him and returned to Rome.

After Virginia married Edoardo Agnelli in 1919, she had difficulty adjusting to life in straitlaced Turin. The burghers clucked that she had extravagant tastes and slept on black satin sheets. Eventually her vitality and generosity won them over.

Edoardo was equally popular, an enthusiastic sportsman and competent manager of Agnelli enterprises. “He was extremely clever and full of charm,” recalled Princess Gabriella Giardinelli, now ninety years old, who knew both Agnellis well. Not surprisingly, the blond and blue-eyed Edoardo had a reputation as a playboy.

Virginia bore seven children—three sons and four daughters. Giovanni was the second child and firstborn son. From birth he was called Gianni to distinguish him from his grandfather, who closely supervised his grandson’s education. Edoardo was severe with Gianni as well, once punishing him when he was only six years old by cutting off all his hair.

Young Gianni had a naughty streak and a tendency to play pranks. One of his schoolteachers described him as “intelligent and gifted with a good memory, but he is content to do just the minimum necessary.”

The Agnelli children were raised by an English governess, Miss Parker. She passed along her Oxford accent, dressed them in identical sailor suits, marched them for miles through the tall colonnaded squares of Turin, and even regulated their time in the sun at the beach. “For the bourgeois families in Turin,” recalled Gianni Agnelli, “it was a strict life.”

It was also a life of privilege and wealth: liveried footmen and tables set with lace and vermeil, basketball games in their own gymnasium, movies in a basement projection room, summers at their home in Forte dei Marmi on the Mediterranean coast, skiing at Sestriere and Saint-Moritz, where they stayed in the Palace Hotel, which Marella said was “like a boat that crossed the winter.”

In July 1935, when Gianni was only fourteen, his father died in a freak accident. The seaplane he was riding in struck a log while landing in Genoa harbor, and when Edoardo stood up to get out, the propeller cut open his head, killing him instantly. He was forty-three years old, and his widow was thirty-five.

Home alone in Turin, Gianni noticed small crowds gathering in the street. Only when he took a closer look did he learn the reason for their anguished expressions: the headlines told him his father was dead.

“I was desperate,” he recalled. “You cry, of course, when you are that young. At age fourteen you know people die, but you never think it happens.” When relatives later came to view Edoardo’s body, Gianni remained in his bedroom, the floor strewn with newspapers.

In the years after Edoardo’s death, Virginia gave her children unaccustomed freedom. She decamped to Rome, where she was mobbed by suitors. At Forte dei Marmi, she sunbathed in the nude. After seven children, she still had a remarkably youthful body, now on display not only to her children but to all their friends.

“To be honest, the first pair of tits I’ve seen in my life were Virginia’s,” recalled Carlo di Robilant, a lifelong friend of Gianni’s. “I remember her coming out of a cabina with no shirt on, and without finding it abnormal at all.”

She took the controversial political writer Curzio Malaparte as her lover, causing the Senator to seize custody of her children. She fought back in the courts and even successfully appealed to Mussolini. The children protested as well, refusing to speak to their grandfather and disobeying Miss Parker’s instructions. Finally the Senator capitulated to an eloquent plea from Gianni.

In the view of Marie-France Pochna, Gianni’s mother’s behavior indelibly marked him in his late teens. “The barrier of traditional morality having broken down with Virginia, Gianni came to conclude that it is better to definitely renounce it, since it appears useless in the face of the dissoluteness he sees all around him. . . . He looks for a substitute morality, the esthetic morality. . . . Agnelli will lead a perfectly uninhibited lifestyle, but elegance will be preserved.”

Throughout this period, the Senator kept a close eye on Gianni. When the young man faltered in his studies, the grandfather had a special tutor who wore striped trousers and a black cutaway and favored liberal political theories. The Senator introduced Gianni to business by taking him on factory tours and sending him on a trip to America when he turned eighteen. After making his way through Manhattan, where “I never went to sleep,” he visited the auto assembly lines in Detroit. “It was our dream, Detroit,” said Agnelli. “It was the top.”

Against the Senator’s wishes, Gianni studied law instead of engineering at the University of Turin, although he dutifully trained in the Agnelli tradition at Pinerolo, an austere building of dark rooms with high ceilings and cold stone floors surrounding a courtyard for maneuvers. Agnelli enlisted in a cavalry regiment when World War II broke out, and went to the Russian front. He was wounded twice and nearly lost a finger to frostbite on the long march home. Agnelli thrilled to the experience of “taking chances” with the soldiers, “seeing their emotions in dangerous situations.” When he returned, Suni saw he had shed all his illusions: “He had become a grown-up man, handsome and cynical.... He would say to me, ‘Why do you talk about being in love? Only maids are in love.’ ”

Serving in North Africa, he was wounded again, but less heroically. One night in a bar he got into an argument with a German officer over a woman. The German drew his pistol and shot Agnelli in the arm. Agnelli said nothing, finished his drink, and left.

He decided to fight with the Allies against the Germans following Italy’s surrender in September 1943. He was en route to the front with Suni, a military nurse, when their driver plunged their car into a ditch. Agnelli cracked his right ankle in half and nearly lost his foot to infection. “He was in terrible pain but he didn’t say a word,” wrote Suni.

In November 1945, Virginia Agnelli was killed in an auto accident eerily reminiscent of her husband’s death. On a drive to Forte dei Marmi, she fell asleep in the front seat, resting her head on a small pillow. Oncoming headlights temporarily blinded the chauffeur, who plowed into a stalled truck at the roadside. Virginia’s head snapped back against a metal strip at the top of the front seat, breaking her neck. She was forty-five years old.

Only three weeks later, Senator Giovanni Agnelli died in Turin. He had supported Mussolini throughout the war, and afterward Italian authorities removed him from Fiat. At the time, the Communists were organizing unions in Fiat factories.

At age twenty-four, Gianni became the family patriarch, while Suni, just a year younger, took over for their mother. Of all the children, Giorgio Agnelli suffered most from being orphaned. Quiet and vulnerable, Giorgio had always been at odds with his overpowering older brother, who teased him much as he would later mock his own son—less out of malice than out of impatience with someone so different. Giorgio had been Virginia’s favorite son, and he never recovered from her death. Suffering from what the family calls “nervous dérangement," Giorgio entered a clinic in Switzerland, where he died of heart failure in 1965 at age thirty-five.

Senator Agnelli’s death taught Gianni about power: “The funeral of my father was enormous, because the power of my grandfather at that time was enormous. Then when my grandfather died, he had lost his power. Nobody was at his funeral. The family walked together through Villar Perosa, which was a Communist town. They were saying, ‘See who remains in the family. Just children. We’ll see what they can do.’ ”

Fortunately for Gianni, the Senator had in place Vittorio Valletta, five feet one inch of pure cunning, to run Fiat. Had the Senator lived, Agnelli told me, “my grandfather would have locked me in the Fiat factory.” But in 1945, Agnelli had no interest in accepting his duties just yet. His passport to freedom was a bit of advice his grandfather had once dispensed: “Have a fling for a few years and get it out of your system.”

Prince Hal headed to the South of France and paid $100,000 for a twenty-eight-room villa, La Leopolda, at the top of a hill overlooking the bay of Villefranche. “There was one vast drawing room after another, one veranda after another,” recalled a frequent visitor. Friends converged every weekend; some stayed for weeks.

The crowd included Hollywood tycoons Jack Warner and Darryl Zanuck, celebrated playboys Aly Khan, Porfirio Rubirosa, Alfonso de Portago, and Baby Pignatari, as well as Agnelli’s great friend Raimondo Lanza, a Sicilian aristocrat of boundless decadence. Several years older than Agnelli, Lanza was a diabolical mentor who Marella would later say “made them all crazy.”

During the day they roared down to the beach in a fleet of Fiat Jollys, small open cars with straw seats, and sailed on Agnelli’s yacht, paneled in mahogany and rigged with red sails. At night there was dinner for thirty, and later casino gambling and carousing in nightclubs. Cocaine was available, prompting Taki to coin what he said was a double entendre for their all-night escapades: “la grande nuit blanche. ” Agnelli insisted that the term meant only “a full night out,” and said he had not been tempted by cocaine.

Yet at another moment Agnelli characterized his postwar years as “rough playtime. There was no light play. I gambled because it was part of the game.” He considered the Riviera “a small enchanted world” with “very little control.” “Was there anything you didn’t try?” I asked. “I don’t think I stopped at anything,” he said, grinning and leaning forward over his desk. “No, I don’t think one was afraid of anything.”

Agnelli kept tethered to Turin during these years. He returned frequently to meet with Valletta and look after the ball-bearing company and the Juventus soccer team, as his father had done. “At six in the morning he would fly back to work,” said a friend from those years. “It seemed like he went ten years without sleep. He looked old when he was forty. But he was always very disciplined. He never gave up a day’s work for a party.”

The other steadying influence in Agnelli’s life was Pamela Harriman, who was then Pamela Churchill, the divorced daughter-in-law of Winston Churchill. Gianni and Pamela lived together first in the Château de La Garoupe in Antibes and then at La Leopolda, where she organized his life and broadened his circle. She was a glamorous redhead with dark-blue eyes and uncanny instincts for pleasing men. “For a provincial boy from Italy, she was a great conquest,” said an Agnelli friend.

Pamela Churchill steered Agnelli toward men who were politically well connected, an advantage to Fiat during the unstable postwar period. Aided by her keen eye, Agnelli redecorated La Leopolda and refined his tastes. He was captivated, he said, by her “sense of fun. She considered life very seriously, though, and always had a great passion for politics.”

Her conversation mimicked Agnelli’s distinctive inflections, and she converted to Catholicism. Pamela seemed destined to marry Agnelli until an August night in 1952, when she walked onto the terrace at La Leopolda at three A.M. and found Agnelli romancing a twenty-one-year-old brunette named Anne-Marie d’Estainville.

“She was livid,” d’Estainville told me. “It was so quick. It didn’t last more than a minute or two, and then she went out. She was like a tornado. Gianni and I were staring like idiots.”

Gianni and Anne-Marie returned to a party at a nearby villa, and Gianni offered to drive her home to Cap-Martin. After disappearing for fifteen minutes, Agnelli met her in his Fiat station wagon. He seemed agitated, his appearance disheveled. “He was not quite right,” she recalled. “I think he had had something to drink. I suddenly realized it was dangerous.” Agnelli told me he had “not especially” been drinking. “I was never a heavy drinker. At four or five in the morning, you surely have been drinking more than necessary.”

Hurtling down the Lower Corniche to Monte Carlo, Agnelli missed a left turn near the first tunnel and careened into a small butcher’s truck, pinning the three men inside against the mountainside. Two friends of Agnelli’s pulled up moments later and whisked Anne-Marie to Monte Carlo, where they washed her cuts with gin. She told neither family nor friends that she had been in the car. All the butchers survived, and Agnelli had a broken jaw in addition to his badly smashed leg.

By the time his family had transported him from Cannes to Florence, his leg was gangrenous. Only Agnelli’s fierce opposition prevented an amputation, but he had to spend nine months in bed. His sisters oversaw his care and screened his visitors. With their approval, he was tended to by their good friend Princess Marella Caracciolo di Castagneto, who had been in love with Gianni for years.

Marella’s father was a cultivated Neapolitan prince, Filippo, Duke of Melito, and her gracious American mother, Margaret Clarke, had the same elegant carriage as her daughter. Filippo lived the modest life of a diplomat. During the war, he and his wife had been active in the anti-Fascist resistance.

Marella enjoyed more independence than most Italian girls her age. She studied art and design in Paris at the Beaux-Arts. In Rome after the war, she met Gianni for the first time and pronounced him “magnificent.” His sisters “used to warn me about him,” she recalled. “ ‘Be careful, you’ll fall in love, and he’ll abandon you like all the others.’ ” “Did he pay any attention to you?” I asked. “Very little. Practically none,” she said. So she moved to New York to work as an assistant to the photographer Erwin Blumenfeld. After a stint as a Vogue model, she returned to Rome to pursue photography.

Her relationship with Agnelli was “a long period of flirtation,” she said, with “ups and downs” that included her engagement to another man. When she heard about Agnelli’s accident, she canceled a sailing trip to join him at his bedside. Many friends have remarked on the resemblance between Marella and Virginia Agnelli—not only the brown eyes and russet hair but also the melodic voice. All Gianni’s sisters considered her the most suitable prospect for a wife—wellborn and well-bred.

“I liked her very much,” said Agnelli. “She was from the Italian-American group, like my mother’s family. They had a special way of living. They spoke English, had Anglo-American habits, and they had lots of flowers in their houses.”

Gianni was thirty-two and Marella twenty-seven when they married near Strasbourg, France, in November 1953. By Agnelli standards it was a small gathering, with one hundred guests arriving by train through a snowstorm. The wedding had been arranged hastily because Marella was three months pregnant. Biographer Marie-France Pochna wrote, “Since in the great families it is considered proper to make witty remarks, someone uttered this one: ‘The new Fiat will be ready for delivery in six months.’ ”

Asked nearly four decades later if Marella’s condition influenced his decision to marry her, Agnelli shot back, “That is irrelevant. I would have married her before or after.” He added that in those days “most people got married under those circumstances.” Marella, he said, brought to his life “an element of order, a sort of guideline. She has a strict approach to life, and we like a lot of the same things.”

Marella has gone at her own pace and pursued her own interests. She has found comfort in religion, which she called “a sense of belonging that’s very peaceful. To be religious is a sort of nostalgia we all have. It is a longing.” She joins her husband on his sailboat Extra Beat and on the ski slopes (where a helicopter transports them to the mountaintop), but otherwise relaxes by gardening or taking six-hour walks through the Alps or the mountains of Corsica.

For eight years she had a successful fabric-design business. She started with Zumsteg in Switzerland and did collections of home furnishings for Martex. Her husband was “really totally uninterested,” she said with a laugh. “I don’t think any Italian man would be very interested in a job a wife carries out.” When Gianni had bypass surgery in 1983, she had to quit. “Yes, that was difficult,” she said, “but I had to make a choice.”

Marella’s patience and reliability have won out, friends say, and the Agnelli marriage has strengthened with time. “Of all the women he has known, the only one he respects is Marella,” said Nicky Pignatelli. Although, like many upper-class Europeans, they keep separate bedrooms—his is two floors away from hers in Saint-Moritz—Marella and Gianni talk on the phone several times each day. Most afternoons in Turin, he comes home and has lunch with her, and they entertain frequently in the evenings. “She is delighted that he adores having her with him,” said one friend.

“He matured very beautifully,” said Marella. “I’m very proud of him in that sense. He is very bright, and like a very fast sailing boat he corrects the false routes.”

Despite the difficulties and demands, Marella never lost her fascination with the Avvocato. “He is a genius of savoir faire,” she said. “He creates motivation, excitement, amusement, attention. I see it on the boat, in the houses, with friends, even with the dogs. He is a magician. He knows how to make boredom disappear, more than anybody else I ever met. There is the sense of the good time ahead.”

In business, that sense is less certain. Gianni Agnelli didn’t take over Fiat until 1966, when he was forty-five and Valletta was eighty-two. As one friend commented, Agnelli “took up pleasure at rather an early age, and finally he decided that power was more interesting.” He had decided to show, said another friend, that “as a dilettante he could be more professional than the professionals.”

With a virtual monopoly on the Italian auto market, Fiat prospered in the postwar years. Then in the 1970s the oil crisis and labor unrest threw Italian industry into turmoil. Agnelli made damaging wage concessions to appease the unions even as Fiat continued to be plagued with crippling strikes and worker sabotage. At the same time, Agnelli and his brother Umberto reduced their investment in car-making and diversified into public transportation and other ventures that proved unprofitable.

In desperate straits, Fiat raised money in 1976 by selling 10 percent of the company to Libyan dictator Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, a move that drew international criticism. Although a decade later Fiat would buy back the stake under pressure from the U.S. government, Agnelli never acknowledged it was an error in judgment. “It was very good for the company and very good for the Libyans,” he told me.

The same year he forged an alliance with Libya, Agnelli considered entering politics. “It was totally out of my nature,” he recalled. “If I had to sit in the Senate, I might have gone mad. I prefer having things done rather than getting votes. There is enormous confusion about success with the public. You look good, speak well, and slowly you become a phony. What politicians are after is very serious, but the means are rather unattractive.”

Another reason Agnelli drew back was the growing danger of appearing in public. In the late 1970s, the Red Brigades launched a wave of kidnappings and terrorism that paralyzed Italy. Agnelli spent several years living behind a heavy shield of security. He couldn’t even visit Villar Perosa, because the roads to his estate were too vulnerable.

In 1980, Agnelli gave up day-to-day management of Fiat. His newly appointed president, Cesare Romiti, provoked an ugly strike by laying off thousands of workers and later secured significant concessions from the unions. Fiat divested itself of unprofitable ventures, withdrew from the U.S. market, strengthened its position in aerospace and communications, and, at the urging of top Fiat auto executive Vittorio Ghidella, poured money into modernizing car production.

By the mid-1980s, Fiat had bounced back and shucked its reputation for making poor-quality autos. Although Agnelli scorns the inefficiency of state-run industries, Fiat has benefited from decades of government support: low-interest loans and preferential tax laws as well as a trade agreement signed in 1956 limiting auto trade between Italy and Japan. As Japanese cars have flooded other countries, only 28,000—2 percent of the market—are now permitted into Italy annually.

For years Agnelli has been uncertain about how dependent Fiat should be on cars. He cannot see how the six major European automakers (Fiat, Peugeot, Volkswagen, Renault, General Motors, and Ford) can profitably compete after 1992. “It’s a real dogfight,” said one veteran auto executive. “Fiat has never succeeded as more than a minor player in other countries in terms of product value and appeal.”

Agnelli knows that consolidating with one of the other five is probably the key to survival. Yet an effort in the mid-1980s to merge with Ford fell apart over the question of control. “He just couldn’t do it,” said one source familiar with the negotiations. “He said, ‘I am the Italian auto industry, and I can’t give the Italian auto industry to Ford Motor Company.’ ”

Now both Japan and the other European countries are pressing for access to Italy, and Fiat’s dominant position there (just over half of all new-car sales) will surely erode. “Gianni knows that capital investment for autos is outlandish,” said one of his former rivals, “and he sees what he could do with that money in nonautomotive areas, so he vacillates.”

Romiti pressed to broaden Fiat’s base by moving into new ventures, such as banking and retailing. His differences with the “autocentric” Ghidella forced the brilliant auto chief out at the end of 1988. Since Ghidella’s departure, Fiat’s share of the European market has dropped.

Agnelli has committed to build factories in Eastern Europe, his bet hedged by the prospect of low-interest loans from the Italian government. “Will these countries be able to afford the changes, or will they have another revolution?” Agnelli mused. “It is a big risk, but if the Japanese do it, then we will have lost our opportunity.”

“Gianni said when you have a choice between not doing something and doing it,” said Henry Kissinger, “you should do it, or you will forever have regrets.”

Kissinger, who is a consultant to Fiat, regards Agnelli as “a more dominant chairman than almost any other. He does it by personality. I have not seen him give peremptory orders or take arbitrary decisions.” When Agnelli needs to decide, said Kissinger, “he picks the brains of a lot of people he considers intelligent, crystallizes his opinion, and tries it on a narrow circle. He has an enormous intuitive sense, but he walks alone.”

Others, however, view Agnelli as indecisive. “You have someone in the middle of the Mediterranean who has a swing in opinion, and the boat goes. He is erratic,” said one auto-industry veteran. “He has a pessimism that underlies much of his thinking, a constant worry it could come tumbling down.”

“I don’t believe in those words—‘optimist,’ ‘pessimist,’ ” retorted Agnelli. “They are states almost of health. You give someone a martini and he becomes an optimist.”

Agnelli’s popularity shows no sign of abating with the Italian public. He continues to make headlines routinely. He has neither reason nor inclination to complain. So it was surprising to see him bristle when I asked him about one oft repeated criticism—that he has “more courage than ideals, more wealth than affection, more brain than heart.”

“Wealth and affection—that’s idiotic,” he said. “You can’t compare the two. Courage and ideals. My ideals are terribly simple—freedom, independence, private initiative. I am as liberal as one can be. And I don’t think I’m particularly courageous, although I’m not a coward. I will never be a Don Quixote, fighting against windmills. Brains than heart.” Here he paused, his expression softening. “I don’t even know how much brain I have. That is so relative. And heart is again a private thing. People who know me well know what I am capable of.”

While it may be apparent only to those close to him, Agnelli has slackened his pace. Besides a triple bypass operation following a heart attack, two skiers crashed into him in Saint-Moritz a decade ago, severely injuring his good leg, and he broke his hip in a fall several years later. In the hospital following his heart attack, Suni saw fear in her brother’s eyes for the first time. “Perhaps it was because he was at that moment powerless,” she said.

These days Agnelli is more likely to haunt an art gallery than a nightclub; wherever he goes on business, he makes a beeline for the newest exhibitions, even if it means skipping lunch. He finds his greatest pleasure in two hours on a mountain or on his sailboat. “If you are on your boat and do a beautiful maneuver, you knock your sails down and you enter the port well,” he said, spreading his arms wide. “Anything that is worthwhile doing is worthwhile doing as well as possible.”

As he neared his seventieth birthday, he commissioned a journalist to write his autobiography, but then shelved it. “I was glad to have things written down,” he said. “Maybe my not wanting it published has to do with my not wanting to talk about private things.” More to the point, though, is the appearance of stepping aside and summing up that a memoir conveys. To the end, Agnelli wishes to be seen as a man of action.

Sally Bedell Smith

Royal watch.

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How Sails From One of Gianni Agnelli’s Yachts Became Stylish Summer Tote Bags

Sea bags turned the sails from l'avvocato's beloved 'tiziana' into handy bags for the beach and beyond., eric twardzik, eric twardzik's most recent stories.

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The late industrialist Gianni Agnelli is famous in the automotive world for the global empire he created with Fiat—and for his ownership of Scuderia Ferrari, which dominated the 1970s Formula 1 world, as well as becoming an iconic supercar marque.

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A piece of that passion is now available via a limited-edition collection of tote bags from the Maine-based bagmaker Sea Bags. On Friday, the company released plans its Tiziana Collection , made from an old sail that Sea Bags rescued from Agnelli’s Tiziana , the 115-foot racing boat built in 1963 by Abeking & Rasmussen.

The sail was discovered in the course of a sustainability-focused partnership between Sea Bags and international sailmaker North Sails. While searching the latter’s inventory for suitable material, a sail that had once belonged to Tiziana was located in a North Sails sail loft in Mallorca (the exact years that the sail propelled the vessel around the Med are undetermined; the boat today is privately owned by a family in the Netherlands).

While the sail’s provenance ensured that every bag would be unique, the actual construction allows for each to be visually distinct. Most sails are fashioned into a triangle shape by fastening together multiple, stacked zig-zag stitches that strengthen the seam.

The Tiziana sail, by contrast, was cut so that each bag would be marked by those identifiable stitches. “We handpicked every sail panel to ensure we were using that beautiful stitching and that it was going to be on every tote,” says Knupp .

Each of the limited-edition totes—which have a numbered certificate of authenticity and retail for $500—features an internal patch with text detailing the history of Tiziana. “We wanted to invoke that history into the creation and personality of the bags,” says Knupp.

Eric Twardzik is a Boston-based freelance writer with a passion for classic menswear and classic cocktails. He has a deep reverence for things that get better with age, such as tweed jackets and…

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Hidden For Decades, We Found Gianni Agnelli’s Custom Fiat 500 And It Has Some Incredible Stories To Tell

Photography by Rosario Liberti

The watch over the sleeve. The short tie sans tie bar. Rugged boots against the finest Italian suits. It’s no revelation that The Rake of the Riviera , to us known as Gianni Agnelli, was a style god. Tailor-made wasn’t just a fashion for Agnelli; it was a lifestyle which was famously the case in his taste for cars as well because, let’s face it, a man of his stature couldn’t just have any average Fiat or Ferrari – they had to be his .

To rattle off a few familiar ones – the one-off Lancia Delta Integrale Spider, Ferrari Testarossa Spider, the jaw-dropping custom Ferrari 375 America.

Though these are all incredibly tasteful in their own right, they don’t fully represent a critical part of Gianni’s lifestyle: leisure and entertaining. You know, a little something for beach days, playboying, hob-knobbing with heads of state – just the usual R and R. For this purpose, he looked to his company’s greatest triumph and pride: the Fiat 500. Charming, unassuming, and unmistakably Italian, the 500, more specifically the 500 Jolly, fit the bill for this purpose like none other.

To the best of our research, Gianni commissioned two Fiat 500 ‘Spiagginas’ from Mario Boano of Carrozzeria Ghia. The second car was a personal gift for his dear friend, shipping magnate and second husband of Jackie Kennedy, Aristotle Onassis (because dessert cake, though appreciated, doesn’t quite cut it at this level of royalty). The Onassis Spiaggina has since disappeared, but after decades off the radar the Agnelli commission has resurfaced.

This happy little car you’re staring at is what records show to be Gianni Agnelli’s personal and custom Fiat 500 Spiaggina. Friend of Petrolicious, Simone Bertolero of Auto Classic Italy , discovered the car intact and unused, retired in a Northern Italian garage. The paperwork accompanying the car show Agnelli’s tenure with number plate TO25879 ended in 1973 when he gifted the car to his driver of nearly 30 years, who then ceded the car to Mario Rossi, a lifelong friend of Gianni’s. Simone, a collector and purveyor, tends to fancy niche cars with significance to Italy’s rich automotive history, notably including his 1960 Fiat-Abarth 1000 Bialbero  La Principessa .

Mr. Agnelli’s tastes are immediately evident when comparing his Spiaggina to a standard one. The chassis was elongated, likely to better accommodate the inevitable movie stars or diplomats climbing aboard. Wood trim handsomely surrounds the body, making the car look a bit more substantial and ‘Riva-like.’ Boano also took liberties with the front styling and removed much of the trim, still retaining the distinct Fiat 500 look but sedating it ever so slightly.

Gianni stationed his prized Spiaggina at the famous Villa Leopolda on the French Riviera. Think of the conversations, the jokes, the glances, the emotions, and the moods that took place in these cars. They were at the epicenter of ‘50s and ‘60s nirvana, experiencing the world’s elite at arguably their most vulnerable. Pictured below are just a few of their best memories including Winston Churchill riding shotgun, Aristotle Onassis attempting to resolve a breakdown, and Marella Agnelli posing with the car for Vogue Magazine.

The Spiaggina’s innocent simplicity in contrast to the larger-than-life, regal characters that puttered around in these cars is oddly quite beautiful. Whether you’re in a mass produced Fiat 500 or a special commission of Agnelli’s, there is a common denominator – joy. A Fiat 500 really doesn’t care who you are, fun is the name of the game. Some may consider this to be over-assigning credit to Agnelli, but doesn’t it feel like this effect was intentional? Well respected by most of Italy, he frequently humbled himself before his fellow countrymen. Something tells me he understood that pictures of him on vacation in the people’s car would feel less conceited.

Only doing the lightest of maintenance to get car running and keep it as original as possible, the Agnelli Spiaggina will be at Simone’s side making its first official showing at Concorso d’Eleganza Villa d’Este this weekend. Unofficially, if you happened to be in Monaco during the historic races a few weeks ago you might have seen our team bouncing around town and the paddock while tirelessly (joyfully) creating this article.

All told, the best illustration of the Spiaggina is that it meets at the intersection of two lovely sentiments: ‘La Dolce Vita’ and ‘what a time to be alive.’ Without a doubt, we know Simone will enjoy the car the way Gianni intended. Smiles per gallon, baby.

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I end up contemplating two different instances of a similar kind, yet as per my examination they were called Fiat 500 Boano Spider Elegance worked by Savio, not Spiagginas. I might not be right however.

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I happen to study two other examples of the same type, but according to my research they were called Fiat 500 Boano Spider Elegance built by Savio, not Spiagginas. I may be wrong though. Can somebody direct me on a factory archive to investigate further? Fiat Storico don’t know…

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Hidden for decades ? And you’re claiming to of found it ? Thats odd considering there’s been at least ten stories over the last three years photos included both in print and online including rumors that it might be for sale . Oh . Not to mention the car was shown extensively both in contemporary as well as classic photos in HBO’s Agnelli documentary from over a year ago .

Wild guess on my part, but I believe the best stories about this vehicle will never be told! We Italian men learn at an early age that discretion is truly the better part of valor.

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Evoking the Spirit of St. Moritz with Gianni Agnelli's Fiat 130 Villa d'Este

One of the most comfortable and most usable cars in the famous Milanese Lopresto Collection to the untrained eye could be seen as just a slightly strange Fiat estate. A car which has no place among such thoroughbreds, as have been seen drifting alongside it at the 2022 The Ice International Concours of Elegance St. Moritz . And yet, it is precisely this unassuming Fiat that has received our Classic Driver Spirit of St. Moritz Award. Here’s why.

The other name for this Officine Introzzi-bodied special edition 130 is “Familiare”, which translates loosely from Italian to “family”, and is the reason why I am not at all surprised when one third of the Lopresto household, two Yorkshire Terriers included, rolls up to the rendez-vous I had made with 2nd generation collector and RM Sotheby's representative Duccio Lopresto on the previous evening. We meet just up the road from the crowded driveway of the Suvretta House, literally 50 meters from the entrance to Chesa Alicyon  –  Gianni Agnelli’s St. Moritz chalet. 

 Mikoyan Gurevich MiG 3 172IAP For the Party of Bolsheviks with Nikolai Sheyenko May 1942 01

Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-3

National origin:- Soviet Union Role:- Fighter Interceptor Manufacturer:- Mikoyan-Gurevich Designer:- First flight:- 29th October 1940 Introduction:- 1941 Status:- Retired 1945 Produced:- 1940-1941 Number built:- 3,422 Primary users:- Soviet Air Forces (VVS); Soviet Air Defence Forces (PVO); Soviet Naval Aviation Developed from:- Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-1 Variants:- Mikoyan-Gurevich I-211 Operational history MiG-3s were delivered to frontline fighter regiments beginning in the spring of 1941 and were a handful for pilots accustomed to the lower-performance and docile Polikarpov I-152 and I-153 biplanes and the Polikarpov I-16 monoplane. It remained tricky and demanding to fly even after the extensive improvements made over the MiG-1. Many fighter regiments had not kept pace in training pilots to handle the MiG and the rapid pace of deliveries resulted in many units having more MiGs than trained pilots during the German invasion. By 1 June 1941, 1,029 MIG-3s were on strength, but there were only 494 trained pilots. In contrast to the untrained pilots of the 31st Fighter Regiment, those of the 4th Fighter Regiment were able to claim three German high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft shot down before war broke out in June 1941. However high-altitude combat of this sort was to prove to be uncommon on the Eastern Front where most air-to-air engagements were at altitudes well below 5,000 metres (16,000 ft). At these altitudes the MiG-3 was outclassed by the Bf 109 in all respects, and even by other new Soviet fighters such as the Yakovlev Yak-1. Furthermore, the shortage of ground-attack aircraft in 1941 forced it into that role as well, for which it was totally unsuited. Pilot Alexander E. Shvarev recalled: "The Mig was perfect at altitudes of 4,000 m and above. But at lower altitudes it was, as they say, 'a cow'. That was the first weakness. The second was its armament: weapons failure dogged this aircraft. The third weakness was its gunsights, which were inaccurate: that's why we closed in as much as we could and fired point blank." On 22 June 1941, most MiG-3s and MiG-1s were in the border military districts of the Soviet Union. The Leningrad Military District had 164, 135 were in the Baltic Military District, 233 in the Western Special Military District, 190 in the Kiev Military District and 195 in the Odessa Military District for a total of 917 on hand, of which only 81 were non-operational. An additional 64 MiGs were assigned to Naval Aviation, 38 in the Air Force of the Baltic Fleet and 26 in the Air Force of the Black Sea Fleet. The 4th and 55th Fighter Regiments had most of the MiG-3s assigned to the Odessa Military District and their experiences on the first day of the war may be taken as typical. The 4th, an experienced unit, shot down a Romanian Bristol Blenheim reconnaissance bomber, confirmed by postwar research, and lost one aircraft which crashed into an obstacle on takeoff. The 55th was much less experienced with the MiG-3 and claimed three aircraft shot down, although recent research confirms only one German Henschel Hs 126 was 40% damaged, and suffered three pilots killed and nine aircraft lost. The most unusual case was the pair of MiG-3s dispatched from the 55th on a reconnaissance mission to PloieÅŸti that failed to properly calculate their fuel consumption and both were forced to land when they ran out of fuel. Most of the MiG-3s assigned to the interior military districts were transferred to the PVO where their lack of performance at low altitudes was not so important. On 10 July 299 were assigned to the PVO, the bulk of them belonging to the 6th PVO Corps at Moscow, while only 293 remained with the VVS, and 60 with the Naval Air Forces, a total of only 652 despite deliveries of several hundred aircraft. By 1 October, on the eve of the German offensive towards Moscow codenamed Operation Typhoon, only 257 were assigned to VVS units, 209 to the PVO, and 46 to the Navy, a total of only 512, a decrease of 140 fighters since 10 July, despite deliveries of over a thousand aircraft in the intervening period. By 5 December, the start of the Soviet counter-offensive that drove the Germans back from the gates of Moscow, the Navy had 33 MiGs on hand, the VVS 210, and the PVO 309. This was a total of 552, an increase of only 40 aircraft from 1 October. Over the winter of 1941-42 the Soviets transferred all of the remaining MiG-3s to the Navy and PVO so that on 1 May 1942 none were left on strength with the VVS. By 1 May 1942, Naval Aviation had 37 MiGs on strength, while the PVO had 323 on hand on 10 May. By 1 June 1944, the Navy had transferred all its aircraft to the PVO, which reported only 17 on its own strength, and all of those were gone by 1 January 1945. Undoubtedly more remained in training units and the like, but none were assigned to combat units by then.

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Breaking the waves with Gianni Agnelli’s custom speedboat G. Cinquanta

The onboard mechanic fires the four BPM V-8 Vulcano engines and the cacophonous growl that erupts and envelopes this bustling corner of Naples’ expansive harbour reminds me of the start of the RAC TT Celebration at the Goodwood Revival, when the seemingly endless stream of thunderous AC Cobras departs the assembly area for the grid. 

Now, RM Sotheby’s has the privilege of finding G. Cinquanta a new custodian , who’ll cherish and enjoy her as much as the last. Freshly fitted with new BPM engines and accompanied by a treasure trove of documentation, it will be offered at its online Open Roads, The European Summer Auction, the bidding for which opens today and closes on 21 July. 

There’s no arguing that Renato ‘Sonny’ Levi built a boat truly befitting of the style and status of Gianni Agnelli, the de facto king of Italy. They’re big sailor’s shoes to fill, but somebody’s got to take the controls of this history-steeped yacht. It doesn’t matter if you’re not a head of industry or carefree playboy, at least you know you’ll be the envy of the harbour wherever you choose to moor, be it Mallorca or Marina del Rey. 

Photos: Rémi Dargegen for RM Sotheby’s © 2020 

• Gianni Agnelli
• Pininfarina
• Made in Italy
• Very Important Provenance
• Customization

This ex-Gianni Agnelli 1969 Sonny Levi G. Cinquanta G50 yacht will be offered by RM Sotheby’s at its Online Only: Open Roads, The European Summer Auction, the bidding for which opens today and closes on 21 July. You can find the entire catalogue listed right here on Classic Driver .

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