With Giuseppe Bono, who died at the age of 78, the last boyar of the state leaves. On the contrary. The last – probably the only – state boyar, in the ancient definition of Eugenio Scalfari, to have exercised a continuous and lasting power, which has crossed the geological eras of the public economy, society and Italian politics, is leaving. The power and responsibility of Giuseppe Bono, from the First Republic of Parties, are in fact transmuted into the Second Republic and have come down to us, stopping only on the edge of the “modernization” desired by Mario Draghi, who interrupted his absolute, radical control and eventually ossified by Fincantieri.
In the First Republic, Bono was a man of the first rank of socialist management who, culturally and operationally, had his “givers” in Bettino Craxi and Riccardo Lombardi. In the geographies of the seventies and eighties, that group of business executives – to which Bono belonged – crossed Iri and Finmeccanica and fully invested the Efim.
In the Second Republic, his undisputed reign was Fincantieri. A publicly controlled company that has modernized its management and, above all, its market positioning, skilfully exploiting its vocation to move between national industry, Italian politics and international geopolitics. Fincantieri, together with Finmeccanica-Leonardo, represented – at the time of the retreat of the large Italian private enterprise of the twentieth century – the hard core to which the entire national system was firmly attached in order not to fall into agonizing provincialism. Giuseppe Bono was aware of this centrality of his. And, for twenty years, he has interpreted – with a force on the verge of domination – the guide of this significant piece of the country system.