Raffaele Mattioli

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Raffaele Mattioli

Raffaele Mattioli (born March 20, 1895 in Vasto , † July 27, 1973 in Rome ) was an Italian banker , economist and publisher .

After studying economics and doing a number of different jobs - including as a journalist and private lecturer - Mattioli joined the Banca Commerciale Italiana (BCI) in 1925 and, over the years, rose to become one of the leading bankers in Italy , as he did in the held in high regard in the international financial world. In addition to banking, which he got into by chance and not following his real inclination, Mattioli worked theoretically in the field of economics and created and promoted institutions such as institutes and libraries for their research and presentation. He has also worked successfully as a publisher and translator in high-quality literature.

Portrait of Raffaele Mattioli from 1934 in his office
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Origin and development

Vasto, Raffaele Mattioli's birthplace, is located in the south of Abruzzo in the province of Chieti on the Adriatic Sea . The Abruzzo region, then and now one of the poorest areas in Italy, is a rugged mountain landscape on the ridge of the Apennines . (Idiosyncratic characters often come from such landscapes; Gabriele d'Annunzio , the poet and soldier, and Benedetto Croce , the philosopher, also come from there.) Raffaele grew up here with two brothers. The father, who was a very wise man, which his son often remembered with joy later in life, was a merchant and ran a small shop in Vasto. Raffaele went to school in Chieti , a university town south of Pescara . In autumn 1912 he began training at a commercial college in Genoa .

Raffaele Mattioli as a soldier somewhere at the front in World War I.
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When Italy entered the First World War on the side of the Entente in May 1915 , Raffaele Mattioli volunteered for military service in the Italian army. He became an officer, saw missions at the front, received awards and suffered wounds.

After the war he and his unit came to Fiume , where d'Annunzio was to begin his adventure in this small republic in September 1919. Mattioli did not accept the poet's evocation of the past, and at some point he said goodbye and began to study economics at the University of Genoa there. After graduating with a doctorate in December 1920, he went to Milan , the commercial and financial center of Italy, where he was for a time editor of the financial magazine Rivista Banearia , a newspaper of the Italian Bankers Association.

Before that, probably in 1919, Raffaele Mattioli had married Emilia Tami in Trieste and soon afterwards had a son. (Emilia died in 1923 and this stroke of fate will have helped Mattioli to a not inconsiderable degree to deeper insights. In 1928 he then married Lucia Mountains for a second time, which resulted in two sons and a daughter.)

In 1922 Mattioli became a private lecturer at Luigi Bocconi University in Milan, which was a leader in Italy in the discipline of economics. (A colleague of his at the faculty was the finance scientist Luigi Einaudi , who was to become President of the Italian Republic in 1948; Angelo Sraffa , the father of Piero Sraffa , with whom Mattioli was friends, was Rector of the University from 1917 to 1926. ) But Mattioli soon had to give up teaching , since he had no tendency to fascism and did not want to pretend it either. The Mussolini regime, established in autumn 1922, did not want to entrust the youth in the slightest to someone with a dissent and so he was no longer allowed to give lectures. Mattioli did not have to leave university and continued to work as an assistant in an economics institute set up by Einaudi, where he was mainly responsible for setting up a library and was in dialogue with other scientists and personalities (such as Piero Sraffa or Carlo Rosselli ).

Around 1924 a new opportunity opened up for Mattioli: The Milan Chamber of Commerce advertised the position of Secretary General, and out of intellectual curiosity - “I thought I had seen enough theory and I wanted to take a look whether the theory is consistent with daily business practice. Ideally, theory and practice should be identical. " - he applied for the job and got it. But no sooner had he familiarized himself with the new position than the then head of the Banca Commerciale Italiana, Giuseppe Toeplitz , offered him the position of private secretary with the temptation to move up further in the BCI. But Raffaele Mattioli hesitated at first, because his actual professional goal was still to work in the academic world and become a professor of economics, and he still hoped that one day it would be possible again. In addition, it was to be expected that the new job would hardly leave him time for his studies. In the end, however, his thirst for knowledge to get to know something that was completely new to him won out, and he accepted Toeplitz's offer and joined the Banca Commerciale Italiana in November 1925.

Literature and balance sheets

Milan 1926: Raffaele Mattioli on the management staff of the Banca Commerciale Italiana
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Raffaele Mattioli is said to have found his way into his new role surprisingly quickly and soon met his boss with deferential superiority - “con defente superità”. Giuseppe (Joseph) Toeplitz, of Polish descent, was a busy spirit with a great knowledge of human nature and all kinds of skill, but he always remained an amateur in the banking business, while Mattioli had become a professional in it after a few years. And so there was a changing of the guard in 1931: Giuseppe Toeplitz retired and Raffaele Mattioli was appointed one of the two general managers who were now responsible for the bank's business. Two years later the other general manager resigned and Mattioli, just 38 years old, became sole head of the BCI, which he would remain for almost forty years.

This new responsibility (like the one before it) demanded a lot from Mattioli. It was a grueling job, as he later recalled, that required a solid understanding of banking, strong nerves, and endless patience. Sometimes he didn't know whether the BCI could go any further, because the whole Italian banking system was in a deep crisis at that time: the bankers no longer controlled money, but let themselves be controlled by money and were therefore in great trouble. The situation finally became so threatening that the Italian state was forced to intervene, because a financial crisis and its consequences are much more dangerous for a dictatorship than for a democracy. The three big banks - in addition to the Banca Commerciale Italiana, the Credito Italiana and the Banca di Roma - were backed by state guarantees and in March 1936 an extensive body of law came into force that fundamentally changed the structures of the big banks. For example, a separation between private banking and commercial banking was introduced and the banks had to choose an area in which they wanted to work in the future, in both areas at the same time was now prohibited. Raffaele Mattioli later said of these times that he had become smarter and sadder in them, but also richer.

In 1938 Mattioli acquired the Riccardo Ricciardi publishing house, where he also worked as a publisher. In the course of time, among other things, editions of the Italian classics were brought out under his direction. To this end, he has translated into Italian the sonnets by Shakespeare , the poem Kublai Khan by Coleridge and poems by Keats from English literature and probably also published them. His love for literature, which also included philosophical texts, rubbed off on what he said and wrote. His sayings very often sounded paradoxical and were not understood by people, which was fine with him. His (later) annual reports in the general meetings of the Banca Commerciale Italiana contained many philosophical passages and enigmatic thoughts that confused the audience, but also fascinated them. For Raffaele Mattioli, everything he dealt with was a creative matter and so for him there was no fundamental difference between a Shakespeare sonnet and a balance sheet.

Mattioli has always been aloof from the fascist regime in Italy. His behavior towards the Church was also very skeptical, especially towards the Vatican, in whose circles he was called the heretic banker - «banchiere eretico». - This extraordinary person has shown his charity and tolerance in his own way: wherever he could, he helped politically persecuted people such as the communist Antonio Gramsci , a seriously ill man, whose clinic costs Mattioli paid for and also helped the im Manuscripts created in prison, the so-called prison notebooks , to be brought to safety. He has also given refuge in the bank to a number of people who were in trouble because of their political attitudes and sent Jewish employees to foreign branches.

During the Second World War Mattioli became politically active in a party founded in July 1942, the Partito d'Azione (Action Party), whose members wanted to overcome the class struggle and achieve liberal socialism . (However, the effect of this party was not very great and it was dissolved again in 1946.) - After the war, Mattiolis BCI participated together with the two other large banks in the establishment of the Banca di Credito Finanziario, or Mediobanca for short that granted medium-term loans (for one to four years) and long-term financial loans. Mediobank was the first Italian investment bank and its first general manager was Enrico Cuccia , another great Italian banker. Soon after the war, it was also that Mattioli gave Enrico Mattei , a dynamic entrepreneur who was then an agent of the Agip and needed capital to exploit natural gas reserves in the Po Valley, a billion-dollar loan. The lending, which was a high risk, allowed Mattei to realize his visions. (Mattei later caused quite a stir in the international oil market and was killed in a mysterious plane crash in October 1962.)

In 1972 Raffaele Mattioli left the BCI (not entirely voluntarily). He refused the title of honorary president, which he was offered. A year later he died in Rome and was buried in the Abbazia di Chiaravalle , a Cistercian monastery in Milan. The choice of the burial site aroused general amazement, but Raffaele Mattioli, who has often been very puzzling in his life, was here again for the last time.

Some Mattiol statements

  • “Today it is almost part of good manners to pretend that you know everything. My father always said to me: 'Don't be afraid to say that there is something you don't understand - especially if you know a lot about it.' (The father's words no doubt approach the mindset of a kungfutse .)
  • "As a banker, you become a man of the fine arts, a critic and a creator."
  • «No statistics can replace the unique operation of the human brain. Human activity must always remain the dominant element ... A great danger for machines is that they ignore the human element. They reduce people to a mere number and thus already carry the risk of misinterpretation. "
  • "We are doing a practical activity of a purely intellectual character: an attempt to unite the abstractness of a mechanical order with the reality of a biological order."
  • «A banker must never lose control of money. If he ever allows the money to take possession of him, he will have trouble. In addition, a banker should always bear in mind the words of Cardinal Borromeo that there is no authority without serving others. "

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personal data
SURNAME Mattioli, Raffaele
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian banker, economist and publisher
DATE OF BIRTH March 20, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH Vasto
DATE OF DEATH July 27, 1973
Place of death Rome