Word: marinotti
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...Franco Marinotti, 66, is a stout, energetic Italian who considers painting his lifework and business a mere sideline. As a painter, whose work bears the name Francesco Torri,* he has achieved critical acclaim throughout Italy for his craftsmanlike landscapes. But it is at his sideline that Franco Marinotti excels. As president of Milan's mammoth Snia Viscosa, he has almost singlehanded turned a tottering business into one of Italy's ten largest corporations and one of the world's biggest textile combines. Last year, with 60 plants turning out textiles in seven countries, Snia Viscosa was worth...
Distress Call. Snia Viscosa has been a one-man outfit almost since the day Marinotti appeared in Milan 28 years ago. Born on the Venetian plains, he had already won a reputation as a hustling textile salesman, first working for Italy's Cascagni Seta mills, where, at 23, he was manager of all the company's mills in Czarist Russia, later as boss of his own worldwide trade corporation. In 1929 Marinotti got a distress call from Societá Nazionale Industria Applicazione Viscosa, onetime shipping company turned textile manufacturer. Snia Viscosa, overcapitalized and overinflated at the 1929 crash...
...Marinotti rushed back to the company's headquarters in Milan, slashed stock par value, cut excess payroll, closed down inefficient plants. Snia Viscosa soon became a profitable proposition-and has remained so ever since. Though Marinotti pushed production for Mussolini, he was thrown in jail for defying the Germans. Released, he went into voluntary exile in Switzerland, wrote poetry and painted while the Allies bombed Snia Viscosa into ruins. After the war, at the pleading of stockholders, he returned to Milan and pledged every penny of his personal fortune (by then well into the millions) to rebuild the firm...
...youth, Marinotti worked in Russia for an Italian textile firm and exhibited annually in Czarist Moscow. Back in Italy, he made a secret of his art, concentrated on being a tycoon...
...make a mystery of his ivory tower until now? Well, says Marinotti, "an industrialist who paints is apt to be looked on by others as a man who is distracted from his own work. However, once a person can show the work he has accomplished...