Giangiacomo Feltrinelli

Early life

Giangiacomo Feltrinelli was born in 1926 into one of Italy's wealthiest families, perhaps originating in Feltre. His father Carlo controlled numerous companies including Credito Italiano, Edison and Legnami Feltrinelli, which managed vast lumber holdings in central Europe, some having provided sleepers for the enormous extension of Italian railway tracks in the nineteenth century. Carlo died in 1935. At the instigation of Giangiacomo's monarchist mother, Benito Mussolini had him created marquess of Gargnano at the age of twelve. His mother Giannalisa Gianzana Feltrinelli married in 1940 Luigi Barzini, editor of the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. During the Second World War the family left the Villa Feltrinelli in Gargnano north of Salò to be occupied by Mussolini and moved to Monte Argentario.

The young Giangiacomo first took an interest in the living conditions of workers and the poor during discussions with the staff who ran his family's estate. He came to believe that under capitalism most people could never attain his privileges and were compelled to sell their labour for a pittance to industrialists and landowners. During the latter stages of the Second World War, Giangiacomo joined the Legnano Combat Group and at the same time enrolled in the Italian Communist Party (PCI), fighting the invading German army and the remnants of Mussolini's regime.

In the post-war period the PCI held an influential position in the Italian electorate (after 1948 it became the main opposition). The country was in economic ruins and the Party's opposition to Mussolini had gained it great popularity. The PCI was in coalition until 1947.

Carlo Feltrinelli's will had made Giangiacomo heir to three-quarters of his assets, and they came fully under his control when he came of age in 1947. Banca Unione (formerly Banca Feltrinelli) was controlled by Giangiacomo until 1968, when it was taken over by Michele Sindona. According to some interpretations Sindona was pushed to buy out Feltrinelli by IOR, the Vatican bank, a minority shareholder embarrassed by cohabitation with a communist partner.

From 1949 Feltrinelli collected documents for the Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Library in Milan, documenting the history of ideas, in particular those related to the development of the international labor and socialist movements. The Library later became an Institute; later still the Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Foundation, possessing some 200,000 rare and modern books, extensive collections of newspapers and periodicals, both historical and current, and over a million primary source materials.

Publisher

Near the end of 1954, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli established a publishing company in Milan, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore. Its first published book was the autobiography of the first Indian Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.

In late 1956 an Italian journalist showed Feltrinelli the manuscript of Doctor Zhivago by the Russian writer Boris Pasternak. Set in Russia, the novel follows a multitude of characters from 1903 to 1943, the period of revolution, bloody civil war, Leninism and Stalinism. Feltrinelli's Slavist advisor told him, "Not to publish a novel like this would constitute a crime against culture". His son's biography of Feltrinelli records the fascinating correspondence between him and Pasternak, as they successfully resisted clumsy attempts by the Soviet regime to halt publication of the novel. Doctor Zhivago immediately became an international best seller. Feltrinelli sold the film rights to MGM for $450,000 and, adjusting for inflation, it became one of the highest-grossing films of all time. As a result of his defiance of Moscow, Feltrinelli was criticised and he decided not to renew his party membership in 1957 though he kept on good terms with the PCI. But the PCI leaders were reluctant to be seen to condone criticism of the Soviet Union.

Feltrinelli Editore scored another coup in 1958 when it published a book rejected by every other significant Italian publisher, The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. Described by some as the greatest novel of the century, The Leopard centres on the Sicilian nobility during the Risorgimento, when the Italian middle class rose violently and formed a united Italy under Giuseppe Garibaldi and the House of Savoy.

Despite these successes Feltrinelli Editore in this period lost about 400 million lire a year on a turnover of 1.207 billion lire. Still, Feltrinelli Libra (a chain of bookstores) had a nominal capital of 120 million in 1956. Feltrinelli Masonite, which he chaired, had a turnover of 1.421 billion in 1965. Another firm which he advised on real estate construction had a capital of 400 million in 1970. So ample funds were available from his other investments.

Whatever his own reading tastes, Feltrinelli was always keen to promote the avant-garde, including the works of the influential literary circle, Group 63. He also took the risk of publishing and distributing novels banned under obscenity laws, such as Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer.

Starting in Pisa in 1957, Feltrinelli built up a chain of retail outlets which after his death became the largest in Italy —over a hundred bookshops.

In 1960 Feltrinelli married the German photographer, Inge Schönthal, and they had a son and heir, Carlo. Inge eventually became the de facto head of the publishing house as Giangiacomo came to devote himself to clandestine political activity, of which she disapproved. Mother and son still run Feltrinelli Editore together.

Activism

In the post-war period Feltrinelli had joined the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) before moving to the Italian Communist Party (PCI), which he left in 1957. Feltrinelli spent the Sixties travelling the world and making links with various radical Third World leaders and guerrilla movements. In the Cuban house of the photographer Alberto Korda Feltrinelli saw and was given the iconic photo of Che Guevara now seen everywhere. Within six months of Che’s assassination, Feltrinelli sold over two million posters bearing the image. In 1964, Feltrinelli met the leader of the Cuban revolution, Fidel Castro. In 1967 Feltrinelli went to Bolivia and met with Régis Debray. Feltrinelli published the writings of figures such as Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh, and a series of pamphlets on the unfolding insurgencies and wars in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. He was a close friend of the student leader Rudi Dutschke, whom he invited to convalesce in Italy when seriously wounded in an assassination attempt. Feltrinelli gave financial support to the Palestine Liberation Front among other causes.

In 1968 Feltrinelli went to Sardinia to make contact with left-wing and separatist groups on the island, intending to make Sardinia the Cuba of the Mediterranean and "liberate it from colonialism". His attempt to strengthen Graziano Mesina's rebel forces was eventually nullified by the Italian secret military intelligence.

Feltrinelli increasingly advocated guerrilla activity in Italy on behalf of the working class. (His sometime stepfather Luigi Barzini thought Giangiacomo preferred the company of men who "despised the masses as he did, who thought them something they could play with.") In 1970, fearing a right-wing coup, Feltrinelli founded the militant Gruppi di Azione Partigiana (Partisan Action Groups, GAP). GAP would become the second militant organization after the Red Brigades to be formed during the Years of Lead. Anticipating assassination attempts by the CIA or Mossad, Feltrinelli assumed a nom de guerre ("Osvaldo") and went underground.

Death

On 15 March 1972, Feltrinelli was found dead at the foot of a pylon of a high-voltage power-line at Segrate, near Milan, apparently killed by his own explosives while on an operation with other GAP members. Some 8,000 people attended Feltrinelli's funeral. His death, like his father's 37 years before, was immediately viewed suspiciously, but Luigi Barzini had considered and rejected the possibility of it having been a killing at the time of Feltrinelli's death:

Yet is it very likely that a conspirator with the gifts of a great novelist or a great film-director was to be found among the secret agents? a plotter capable of staging a death so faithful to the victim—his past, his nature and his character?

In 1974 an audio recording found in a shelter of the Red Brigades described Feltrinelli as

sitting astride the pylon preparing the dynamite. At that time the first accomplice, half-way up the pylon, felt a strong and dry explosion but clung tightly to the pillar … He fell to the ground, looked upward and saw nothing, looked down and saw Osvaldo [Feltrinelli] rolling on the ground. His immediate impression was that Osvaldo had lost both his legs.

In 1979, during an anti-terrorist trial, the Red Brigades defendants read into the court record a signed statement that Feltrinelli

was engaged in an operation to sabotage electricity pylons intended to cause a blackout in a wide area of Milan … It was a technical error committed by him … which led to the fatal accident and the subsequent failure of the whole operation.

Forty years after Feltrinelli died, however, previously suppressed forensic reports surfaced in Corriere della Sera, arguing Feltrinelli had been mugged and later tied to the pylon before the bomb was detonated. The implication was that he had been killed and framed by Italian or Israeli security police. Others have speculated Feltrinelli was murdered by the KGB.

In cultural memory

Feltrinelli, an 80-minute documentary by Alessandro Rossetto, was released in 2006.

Feltrinelli, played by Fabrizio Parenti, appears in the 2012 film Piazza Fontana: The Italian Conspiracy (Romanzo di una strage) by Marco Tullio Giordana. The film is about the 1969 bomb explosion in Milan's Piazza Fontana, the subsequent fall to his death from a police window of an anarchist suspect, and the putative murder of Luigi Calabresi, the investigating police commissioner. In the film he takes part personally in the discovery of Feltrinelli's body: Calabresi in reality directed the investigation from Milan.

Feltrinelli's life story was the subject of the 2013 concept album and theatrical performance Praxis Makes Perfect by the group Neon Neon.