At the origins of Intesa Sanpaolo: Turin and Italian history of civic and economic culture

A history of institutions and ordinary people. Turin-based and Italian. The story of a bank that - like every credit institution - is also a sort of material infrastructure and intangible framework around which the vicissitudes of Turin and the country are composed.
A piece of white finance, but with that almost Protestant connotation that has the Catholicism of the North-West, with the Alpine valleys of Piedmont and Valle d'Aosta full of heretics or non-Catholics.

The volume La banca dei valori. Dal Monte di Pietà a Intesa Sanpaolo, (Leo S. Olschki Editore, pp. 242, € 38) by Francesco Antonioli. A book composed of papers and documents and voices and testimonies. Antonioli writes in a passage of the book: 'In 1932 San Paolo became a credit institution under public law and the board of directors took on a precise physiognomy:
the president was appointed by the king, while the other eight members were nominated by the minister of finance, two by the mayor of Turin and one by the mayor of Genoa, one by the president of the province of Turin, two by the provincial council of Turin and one by that of Genoa. So, to recapitulate the names of San Paolo from its beginnings to the twenty years: it started with the ancient Compagnia di San Paolo (from 1563 to 1852), followed, after almost three centuries, by the Opere Pie di San Paolo (in 1853). In 1901 the Istituto delle Opere pie di San Paolo (Beneficenza e credito) was established in Turin. In 1927 the name was coined: Istituto di San Paolo in Torino. Beneficence and Credit. In 1932 it was slightly modified: Istituto di San Paolo in Turin. Credit and Beneficence'. The didactic chronology of dates and names renders well the dimension of the times and methods of that clot of civic culture, economic practice, and religious empire that is the administrative, juridical and 'political' experience that would lead to the birth, in the contemporary age, of the Istituto Sanpaolo. And, above all, it shows its connection with institutional structures and its immersion in the current of history.

Antonioli, making a series of cross-references to the older dimension, has written a book that analyses and reconstructs above all the last hundred years of the bank's life in Turin and the people of Turin. He does so by recounting everyday life: in the early 1960s, 'at San Paolo one observed and absorbed, like porous soil, what was in the air and in the events. Always on the move, like industrious ants, were the employees, managers and customers, busy - despite their worries - cultivating concrete dreams. The appetites of certain politicians were far removed from the rooms in Piazza San Carlo, brand new, and Via Monte di Pietà, smelling of history and with their roots firmly planted four centuries earlier. The best guarantee for the clouds on the horizon'. And he does so by resorting to oral history, thanks to a whole series of interviews with former San Paolo employees. Both the lesser-known ones and those with public notoriety. Antonioli recalls: 'Even a young employee of San Paolo, Ernesto Olivero, had just founded, together with some friends and his wife Maria Cerrato, on 24 May 1964, a special group: SERMIG, the Youth Missionary Service, with the aim of fighting hunger in the world and helping those in need. Olivero, born in 1940, originally from Mercato San Severino, in the Salerno area, the last of nine children, had arrived with his family as a child in the Chierese area. He was working in a cooperative as an accountant, when he was asked if he was interested in joining the Chieri branch, because the manager could hire for special needs even if not by competitive examination. 'It was the beginning of the 1960s, and I first went to the manager of the cooperative to ask his permission,' Olivero recounts today. The man was amazed, almost moved: 'You are not a comrade and you behave like this? I promised him that I would go and help them for free after working hours at the bank''.

There exists, therefore, in the volume the need to intersect the plane of the bank's vicissitudes with the intimate dimension of those who built that bank and to place both in the more general context of contemporary Italy. And there is also, in the entire structure of the volume, the search for the cultural figure - Catholic or secularly Catholic - to define the identity of this history, which in the end - after a secular time - was united with the post-Montini and Bazolian Catholicism of all that, in Lombardy-Veneto, was generated - then having Banca Intesa as its fulcrum - from the ashes of Banco Ambrosiano. A figure that is well explained by Gian Maria Gros-Pietro, chairman of Intesa Sanpaolo, in a text included in the book: 'If instead of being spent a currency is hoarded, it stops producing. This is the economic meaning of the parable of the talents: the master reproaches the servant who has buried the talents entrusted to him, because he has sterilised them. The evangelical meaning of the parable goes even further, because in a society where there are masters and servants, the latter need their labour to be demanded, and remunerated, so that money circulates. But hoarded money, besides becoming sterile, holds a latent power commensurate with its quantity, which can be activated in different directions. For instance, to build an irrigation canal, and thus stably increase the attainable agricultural production, all other factors being equal. But it can also be employed in the purchase of a large quantity of grain in order to take it off the market and raise its price until it can be resold at a profit. The possible speculative use of money, which does not contribute to production, as an irrigation canal does, but instead tends to steal part of its social value, makes it clear why a pontiff called it 'the devil's dung'. Yet, if investments, such as irrigation canals, are to be made, money must be hoarded, saving a part of the income. One of the bank's tasks is to collect the money of people who wish to save a part of their current income, in view of future needs, in order to channel it in the direction of those who have present investment opportunities, which are greater than their availability: only thanks to this transfer does saving, which is an individual virtue, not become hoarded and turn into a social detriment, but rather becomes an engine for the growth of well-being'. And this happens in Turin and Italy, in Europe and the world.