David Rosenthal

He's the one who survives.

Yeah.

I mean, the title of his memoirs is My Terrible Joys.

Tells you everything you need to know right there about Enzo's life.

Yep.

So when he comes back home to Modena at the end of the war, he has no hope whatsoever.

But he does still have his dream of motor racing.

And remember, he's still like a teenager, basically, at this point, a late teenager, early 20-something.

He starts making noise to his mom about selling the family house to finance buying a racing car and that he's going to go out and race this car and win prize money to support them.

It's an audacious plan.

It's an audacious plan.

His mom is like, uh, no.

How about instead, how about this?

Why don't you go try to get a job at a car company and see where things go from there?

And so it's like, okay, okay, fair compromise.

So his mom arranges for him to travel to Turin, a big city in the northeast of Italy, where he interviews for a job at Fiat.

And Fiat is the biggest Italian car company at the time and will come back up many, many times in this story.

It is, as you all probably know, essentially the Ford Motor Company of Italy.

And the family behind it, the Agnelli's, are the wealthiest and most important industrialists basically in the history of Italy.

And today they own and control both Stellantis, which is the merged result of Fiat, Chrysler and Peugeot.