The road, lined with elegant maritime pines, runs right on the embankment of the Tiber, which here is still an impetuous stream, squeezed between the mountains that leave only a strip of land, and not yet the blond river sung by Virgil: along the Tiberina Bis, at the height of Pieve Santo Stefano, a path leads to the top of a hill, entirely occupied by a series of sheds. At the entrance, the English flag flutters alongside the Italian and EU flags. There is a fourth that very few people in all of Italy would be able to recognize: it has the same shade of blue and yellow as the EU, but only has a cursive “E” in the center. It is the coat of arms of the Queen Elizabeth: the last place where one would expect to find it is in the middle of the Apennine mountains. To hoist it is there Deals, name that sounds English but stands for Trafilerie Toscane: one of the many SMEs in the country, unknown to the general public but jewels of technology and manufacturing: 130 million euros turnover, more than half with exports. In a remote area of central Italy, in the mountains, the Brexi and the EU they coexist without problems. Inside the offices, a framed photo of the Queen is next to that of the president Sergio Mattarella. Technically, the Tratos is in the province of Arezzo, but this extreme tip that creeps in Umbria is closer to City of Castello and has Romagna influences, because the border with Cesena it is also a few kilometers away.
From logs to cables
Despite being a tiny village, Pieve has a thousand-year history: in Roman times it was called AID and from here the trunks that reached as far as the Tiber were thrown into the Tiber Roma floating. The mountains of Pieve were the timber warehouse of the Eternal City: tells it Pliny the Elder and it is to be believed because the greatest geographer of the Roman Empire had a huge estate right in Città di Castello. Two thousand years later, instead of the trunks there are copper cables: “Without cables, today the world returns to the stone age” he begins with an impressive phrase Albano Bragagni, the president of Tratos. From the factory with four flags, in one of the most isolated places in the country, technology comes out that not even the great German or Japanese giants can boast. And perhaps it is not by chance. In the handkerchief of Italy around Pieve, the Renaissance: a road sign along the Tiberina Bis informs that Anghiari is 17 kilometers away and there Leonardo he painted one of his masterpieces; even less the distance from Sansepolcro, the city of Piero della Francesca who invented the perspective in painting on the wall of the town hall by painting the Resurrection of Christ. “Running in the family”The British say when there is an inheritance. The Renaissance was the triumph of logic, which has come down to today in other forms. “We have desire and inventiveness” sums up Bragagni, the perfect embodiment of family capitalism. It couldn’t be more familiar: he, who is celebrating his 70th birthday this year, took over from his father-in-law. In the 50s Egidio Capaccini emigrò in Argentina and when he returned, in the 1960s, he founded the Trafilerie Toscane. But the turning point arrives at the end of the 70s: Capaccini dies suddenly and the daughter’s husband takes over. At just 28 he deals with the Trust Union of Milan: “To liquidate the other shareholders I got into debt for 780 million Lire”, A monstrous figure for the time. But it was worth it: from there Bragagni’s adventure began. The only super conductors in the world for the future nuclear power plant in France of the Iter project; the cables of the cranes of the port of Busan, in South Korea; the Telefonica network in Spain, are all born in this remote warehouse, inaugurated in 1980 and expanded over the years up to the 50 thousand square meters current. In Pieve, however, no one calls him by name: for everyone he is just and simply the Engineer. Practically the town is a branch of Tratos so that for 30 years Bragagni was also the mayor. And, another boast, “we have never done an hour of layoffs or fired anyone.” The Little Ancient World has its advantages. In the Italy of the great unfinished works, of the crumbling infrastructures, the Tratos resembles the hornet of the proverb: it flies even if it cannot. The luck is that the trucks with the 10-ton reels have to travel just 500 meters when they leave the factory to take the E45, the most bumpy highway in Italy, to go (slowly) all over the world.
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Fanfani & Fascism
Legend has it that the strategic artery that connects Bologna and Venice with Rome and the South crosses the Apennines right there at the behest of Amintore Fanfani, one of the greatest statesmen of the First Republic, who was born in the small Pieve Santo Stefano in the early 1900s. “It is a hoax – Bragagni cuts short – the highway passes here because simply because it follows the route of the Tiberina wanted by Benito Mussolini to connect Rome and Venice ». However, if the geographically not received Pieve enjoys two junctions, the hand is of the great father of Christian Democracy. In the wake of the road system, shaped by the Fascist era, the word that best describes the philosophy of Tratos is autarky: “We produce everything ourselves, it is the school of Enrico Mattei, we must not depend on anyone ». Every year they import 20 thousand tons of copper from South America: “It is the first metal that man has learned to work, but today, due to prices, steel is also used” explains Bragagni, a past as a sprinter: he competed with Pietro Mennea and the fastest man in the world “once he even lent me his running shoes: mine had broken”. Tratos is the classic pocket multinational even if only exports are multinationals. The brains, in Pieve, are not on the run: the company has no engineers who come from Silicon Valley or super manager who left the Sorbonne. Everything is family run and the employees are all from the area. Of the 3 thousand souls that populate the small village, 300 work in or is the Tratos: one in ten works for the Bragagni family. The Leonardo of Tratos, the only person in the world able to create a special cable for the CERN of Geneva, when all the world‘s giants had withdrawn because the business was too difficult, he is a local industrial expert: Marcello Serri. Bragagni has an explanation for this too: “Here we have been studying mathematics since the 15th century”, since the days of Luca Pacioli, the friar who invented the double entry, also, coincidentally, born in Sansepolcro.
At the Queen’s court
If we were really in the United Kingdom, and not only with flags, someone like Serri, nicknamed “Scintilloni” in the company, would already have a degree honoris causa. But this is Italy and England is far away: but Her Majesty is the first fan of the Tratos cables. In 2008, the company opened a factory in Knowles, a suburb of Liverpool. It was a bet by his nephew Maurizio that for 20 million he buys the last independent cable manufacturer, left with only one employee and on the verge of bankruptcy. To Uncle Albano, who twenty years earlier had set foot in the UK by buying a warehouse near Sheffield, informed him what he did. After twelve years, Tratos Uk is one of the first suppliers of Network Rail, the British railways. And the queen awarded them with the Queen’s Award, the highest recognition for a business in the UK. Today Maurizio is the head of the British division, which opened the company to the political establishment of Westminster, is honorary consul of San Marino, professor at CAS University and attends Theresa May. He was the first Italian entrepreneur to be received by His Majesty a Buckingham Palace. The cable industry, in the two legs of the optical fiber for the internet and the super conductors for energy, is divided into two great schools of thought: “Those who focus on large volumes and those who specialize in highly innovative cables”. In the first case the example is Prysmian, the former Pirelli Cavi; in the second the Tratos. “We are the only cable industry that is not an offshoot of Pirelli and has no managers or staff coming from Bicocca. Our origin is Argentine “claims Bragagni. But even the small Tratos benefited from the Prysmian effect: the Milanese giant that capitalizes on 7 billion euros has driven the entire supply chain. In his office, the vice president Ennio Bragagni, he framed the sheet of paper, of those used in meetings, where Valerio Battista in person, Prysmina’s number one, wrote the contract in which he sold him disused cars. In Pieve, however, a wreck has been transformed into a state-of-the-art device. It is no coincidence: the first machine designed by Capaccini still works inside the factory.
Long live family capitalism
While he blows out the candles, the engineer Bragagni is still, a volcano of ideas and passion for his creature. But do not talk to him about bringing his company to the stock market, which would also be an ideal candidate: “We have no intention of going public on the Milan Stock Exchange: we are too used to doing everything alone without having to share information with others; and then for a company of our size the fixed costs would be disproportionate ”, he said, touching on the sore point of the reluctance of SMEs to the market. The stock market, however, also serves as a way to defuse the mine of the generational shift, in the country where fathers build and children too often destroy. But the boss has already solved the problem: “Family businesses are the ones that have best resisted the pandemic. We have divided duties and powers in the company: my children Elisabetta and Ennio are both managing directors; my brother follows the Catania plant and my nephew the United Kingdom. ” Simple, like double entry, but you have to do it. In the lands of the Renaissance, which invented the Great Beauty, a treasure of Italian family capitalism is hidden.