Italy mourns the 'last king of the Roman republic'

Gianni Agnelli, the patriarch of Fiat and the man one wit called "the last king of the Roman republic", died yesterday aged 81 at his home in Turin, after a long illness.

Mr Agnelli, the man Italians called l'avoccato, "the lawyer", towered over Italian life for decades, not merely in business but also in politics, sport, style and the national identity.

Silvio Berlusconi, the Prime Minister, said yesterday: "He was a leading figure in Italian life for more than half a century." But more memorable was a comment he made about Mr Agnelli some years back: "One should go down on one's knees in his presence."

He was the best-connected Italian in the world, numbering among his close friends Henry Kissinger, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, Katherine Graham, Teddy Kennedy and Lord Carrington. The football team he owned, Juventus, is one of the best in Europe and his newspaper, Corriere della Sera, the most authoritative in Italy. Ferrari was not his company but he bought a big chunk of it and, yesterday, one minute's silence was observed at all Ferrari plants. Mr Kissinger once said: "Gianni is so charming that you forget what a strong man he is."

Mr Agnelli's decline from his peak of strength dates only to 2000, when his 46-year-old son and heir Edoardo committed suicide by jumping off a bridge in Rome. After that, Mr Agnelli was out of the limelight, being treated for prostate cancer.

But yesterday his impossibly handsome, Greek-god profile – hooded eyes, aquiline nose, powerful chin – was all over the airwaves again as television stations cleared their schedules for lengthy tribute programmes. Workers at Fiat suspended a strike in a gesture of respect.

Pierferdinando Casini, Speaker of the lower house of parliament, said: "He was a symbol of everything we were and are ... The history of Fiat and the Agnelli family is intertwined with that of Italy."

Born in Turin in March 1921, Giovanni Agnelli (as he was christened) was brought up in the home of his grandfather, also called Giovanni, founder of the family motor car firm, from the age of 14, after his father died in an air crash. He was groomed in upper-class British style under the eye of an English governess, Miss Parker, who used to tell him: "Don't forget you are an Agnelli!" But in breaking those formal bonds Mr Agnelli became a style icon for generations of Italians, wearing buttoned collars unbuttoned, wristwatch strapped over his sleeve, tie draped over his pullover. In his appearance as much as in his achievements he became Italy's pre-eminent role model.

His main achievement was to seize the opportunity offered by Italy's reconstruction after the Second World War to transform the modest family enterprise he inherited into a vast, sprawling company with a monopolistic grip on the Italian car market – a market that Fiat created from scratch.

In the process it also lured hundreds of thousands of men from the poor south to work in the north's factories, draped the entire Italian peninsula in motorways and hobbled public transport to encourage more and more Italians to buy cars.

"His death brings Italy's 20th century to an end," one woman in Rome said. "Fiat was the brand of the economic boom of the 1960s, from the Lambretta scooter to the Fiat 500, the Toppolino ["mouse"], everybody's first car. For the generation of my father, timidly starting to emulate the lifestyle in other, richer countries, Gianni was the leader. He was the face of Italian capitalism: fast, generous, but also ruthless."

Obituary, page 20; Fiat sale speculation, page 21