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"To look far ahead, ever further ahead, must be our motto."
Episode 12 · June 30, 2026 · 53min
The forgotten Italian who became one of the richest industrialists in Europe
In Buona Compagnia is an Italian podcast. This is the English version of the episode: the video has English subtitles, and the transcript, reflections and sources are translated. The quotes from the book are our own translation from the Italian: Confessioni di un sognatore has no English edition. Versione italiana →
Riccardo Gualino (Biella, 1879) set off at 17 with a first salary of 50 lire and within twenty years became one of the richest men in Europe. Confessioni di un sognatore (Confessions of a Dreamer) is his autobiography, written in 1945 and kept shut in a drawer for more than seventy years, until 2021.
The son of a goldsmith, with no degree, he learned everything on the job: first in the timber trade in Genoa, then by building a forestry empire between Russia and Romania. The First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution took everything from him. And he started again: first with an import-export business, bringing coal and steel from the United States to a Europe at war, in partnership with Agnelli, then with SNIA Viscosa, which in 1925 produced 11% of the world’s artificial silk and was the first Italian company ever listed in London and New York.
One idea struck us above all. Gualino did not build for money: he wanted money in order to build. He dreamed of remaking Turin, of bringing factories to the South of Italy, of linking Turin, Genoa and Milan with high-speed trains, already in the 1920s. For him, the billions were only the instrument of a dream.
The forgotten Italian who became one of the richest industrialists in Europe
Riccardo Gualino
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The forgotten Italian who became one of the richest industrialists in Europe
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The forgotten Italian who became one of the richest industrialists in Europe
Ten key reflections from the episode
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"Buying is easy: all you need is money, and to pay. Buying well is difficult."
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"If I had to choose a motto that summed up my most fervent desires, I would write: 'Create and be first.' Because nothing gives as much satisfaction as building amid the thrill of being first. These are, however, labors and thrills that wear you out."
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"The beauty of money lies in the power it gives to whoever holds it: to conceive a great undertaking, to see thousands of men transform poor tracts of land into centers of work and well-being with new industries. These are joys of the imagination; but if to make these dreams come true you need money, and you have it, then it is a source of happiness. He who has created something can claim to have lived: even if unfortunate, he will always be worth more than an indifferent spectator."
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"My passion is to build, to raise something that lasts. Nothing is more interesting to me than making a factory rise from bare ground, studying its organization, equipping it with the most modern systems, seeing a factory working at full pace that transforms raw material harmoniously, in a practically perfect way, into finished products through countless intermediate stages of processing, like a symphony or a work of art. Order and rhythm: these are the pillars on which a large company can be made to prosper."
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"In the world of business, of whatever kind, the most scrupulous order is the best guide."
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"No building, however imposing, can stand if its foundations are not solid; indeed, the mightier it appears to the eye, the firmer its foundations must be."
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"From that venture I learned that even experience must be constantly watched over: a healthy, sturdy tree is not enough to gather good fruit from it; you have to tend it, prune it, defend it from the attacks of insects, to have ripe and not wormy fruit on the table."
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"If I want to draw a moral from this affair, it may show that even the most capable, the coolest-headed individuals, with their feet most firmly on the ground, can make serious errors of judgment, just as professional dreamers, perhaps a little mad, sometimes see far."
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"Have the courage to dare. Dare to act, dare to throw your heart over the obstacle, dare to burn the ships behind us."
