Enrico Mattei (1906-1962) was the most acclaimed entrepreneur in Italy after World War II. A small industrialist before the war and a leading anti-fascist partisan during the war, Mattei in the 1950s created one of the largest public industrial conglomerates in Italy.

Mattei was born in Acqualagna (Pesaro), a small, non-descript village in which a leather processing plant was the main employer and the only manufacturing activity. As a young man he was a high school dropout but did well as a blue collar worker. By the age of 20 he became the director of the only plant in the village. When the plant had to be liquidated, he moved to the big city--Milan--where at first he acted as a sales representative for German chemical firms. Eventually, he opened his own small chemical plant, which in spite of the 1930s depression had a tremendous financial success. By 1936, at the...