The Benetton family's longest hour

Finished speaking, I remain silent, take a breath, sit down and watch my cousins. I can sense it, I can almost touch it, the pride of being part of our family, our DNA. Everything is intact: the seriousness, the dedication, the respect, the passion, the creativity, the ability to take risks and responsibility. Not even my cousins want to retire.

We could have become what many already thought we were, i.e. quitters, only interested in profit, selling out and leaving, or we could have risen again as a second generation capable of picking up the baton of the first, carrying it forward under their own leadership. We chose this second possibility.

We steer and accelerate at full force, compact as a Roman tortoise. We are heirs to an important tradition and now is the time to project it into the future...

The following months are very busy and, in 2021, Atlantia sells Autostrade to a consortium of public and private players led by Cassa Depositi e Prestiti. At that point, we have to rethink everything. We focus on the keystone of the holding company's design and economic relaunch: its culture. We decide that Edizione must be animated by an entrepreneurial spirit, focused on the challenges of the millennium, namely innovation and sustainability, in all their many declinations, and act with a global perspective, since nobody does anything alone.

All that remains is to identify who will lead this transformation. Enrico Laghi's mandate expires at the end of the year, but nobody has any doubts and we ask him to stay on as CEO of the new Edizione, which becomes a joint-stock company in January 2022. A chairman is needed and everyone agrees that I should take on this role. I accept with joy, happy to be able to put the maximum of my entrepreneurial and creative skills at the service of all the subsidiaries... We therefore intend not so much to manage the existing, but to write a new volume of family history by taking care of its roots. We put this intention into practice first of all by revolutionising Atlantia, together with a handful of good and capable managers. Awareness, responsibility, sense of duty: these are the values on which we have founded its renewal. Without ever forgetting what happened. In three years Atlantia was restructured in terms of shares, management and lines of development, which now focus on network infrastructure and integrated mobility, technological innovation and sustainability. At the end of this process, we realise that there is very little, if anything, left of the previous company: finding this new player a name of its own is almost an act of duty. In 2023 we christen it Mundys, because it makes explicit the horizon of our daily endeavour: the planet and the living beings that inhabit and traverse it.

In his second book Mai fermi. Otto punti fissi per la tua traiettoria (Mondadori, pp. 204, € 20) Alessandro Benetton talks about the eight 'masters' who have inspired him in the most important moments of his life. In the last chapter dedicated to his father Luciano, entitled Perseverance, the author reveals a meeting that until now has remained confidential, held in 2021 in the headquarters that for years has been the heart of the Benetton Group, during which his cousins unexpectedly ask him to take over the leadership of Edizione, the family holding company. This is the first step of the new generation, which decides to take charge of the severe difficulties the Group is going through, to open a phase of total renewal, recovering the values of the 'founding fathers'.