‘Italia must complete its development as an industrial nation’
by Paolo Bricco
‘The historical remnants of the old patronage system are fading away in Italian businesses. Competition is no longer driven solely by product and process innovation and the ability to export, but also concerns business processes and corporate governance. The notion that the interests of the entrepreneur and the company are one and the same – with the former taking precedence over the latter – is a taboo that has been broken. Italia became the ‘land of factories’ thanks to the strength of its entrepreneurs. But if it wishes to remain at the forefront of international industry in the age of new globalisation, it must complete this process of maturation.”
Giovanni Barbara – born in 1960, a commercial lawyer – embodies the characteristics of the professional middle class of the South: a minority group that is both silent, elitist and down-to-earth: an obsessive devotion to work, a strict adherence to formality, and the belief that, through frenzied and desperate study, the course of events can always be altered – nothing is set in stone – the exact opposite of the stereotype of a South that is immobile and frozen in time for ever and ever. We are at Mimì’s in San Gregorio sul Mare, in the most beautiful and sun-drenched part of Salento, a few kilometres from Alessano, the small town where the Barbara family has lived since time immemorial.
His father, Andrea, was managing director of Banca Tamborino, the private bank owned by the landowning family of the same name, and ran his own law practice. His grandfather, Giovanni, had held the same position. In the South, patriarchal authority was strict and dictated the lives of others: ‘One day at my grandfather’s house, as a child, I stared too intently at a bicycle. My grandfather glared at me and told me I mustn’t dare to want that bike so much, and in such an obvious way. My father and my mother, Maria Pia, had six children, each a year apart. I was the eldest. Five sisters followed: Mariella, Rosanna, Matilde, Claudia and Monica. My father decided that, given our large family and the logistical problems that would ensue, we would all have to attend the only school in Alessano, a technical and commercial college. No classical or scientific grammar school. My mother, who taught Latin and Greek at the secondary school in Tricase, six kilometres away, had to keep quiet, but she established a strict routine at home: up at six, breakfast of focaccia, cake and cappuccino, and then two hours of Latin and Greek lessons, before going to the technical college. Every single day. For a young lad, it was neither easy nor pleasant.”
It’s a mild, pleasant heat. For a starter, Mimì suggests a seafood and sea urchin salad. The rosé from the Conti Zecca winery goes down a treat. Barbara’s career path is set to unfold between the South and New York, Milan and Rome. In 1985, Puglia was home to a wealth of private banks, savings banks, cooperative banks and credit unions. Barbara opened two K-Legal offices in Lecce and Bari, where 40 professionals were working within three years. Giovanni Semeraro, owner of the Banca del Salento, asked her: ‘Are you sure you’re a solicitor? Because your office opens at two in the afternoon. Here, lawyers resume work at five o’clock after lunch.’ Barbara became a partner at K-Legal in 1990 and travelled every week from Bari and Lecce to Milan and Rome, taking charge of Italian banks and the subsidiaries of Deutsche Bank, Citibank and Credit Suisse.
For our pasta dish, let’s have tubettini with grouper sauce. To drink, let’s have a Cantele Chardonnay. The early 1990s were marked by the Amato-Ciampi reform and the Bank of Italy’s strong push for mergers: ‘The major banks in the North bought up the smaller institutions in the South. The initial result was a flow of savings from the South to the North, where funds raised at low cost were channelled into the productive sector at profitable rates. This led to a rationalisation of the banking infrastructure and an impoverishment – or at least a decline in vitality – of the social and economic fabric of the South. In Puglia, the number of banks fell from 57 to 22. The second consequence was the failure of the southern ruling classes. The moral suasion of the Bank of Italia pushed for mergers between small banks, leading to larger entities whose leadership coincided with the areas where funds were raised. Often, however, local power brokers could not agree on the distribution of board seats, and so the outcome was a foregone conclusion: banks from the North bought them out, relocating the decision-making centres elsewhere.”
