Lesson Transcript

Hello everyone, welcome back to ItalianPod101.com.
My name is Desy.
Mi chiamo Desy.
And in this video, we're going to talk about the top 5 businessmen in Italy.
I cinque imprenditori più famosi in Italia.
So even though with businessmen, we mean people that as you know is in business, there's also women, right?
That's why I use the word imprenditore, which is entrepreneur, which could also be imprenditrice if used referring to a woman.
We're actually going to talk about three men and two women, talking about imprenditori and imprenditrici, so entrepreneurs in general.
First one is Giovanni Ferrero.
He was born in 1964, then later on, like about 10 years later, he moved with the family to Bruxelles,
and later he also went to the US in order to study marketing, and then he came back to Italy.
Since 2011, he is the only CEO of Ferrero Industries, which you may know for Nutella, of course, but not only.
It has many products, sweet products, and recently even not only sweets.
The fun fact about this is that Nutella actually was born during the war when cocoa was not that easy to find,
so this chocolate spread became a substitute of the chocolate that everyone was using.
But then people liked it so much that even when they could go back to the products that they were used to, they didn't.
Forbes said that Giovanni Ferrero is the richest man in Italy, as in 2021.
He's not only an entrepreneur, he's also a writer.
In fact, there are many publications from him.
Similar to the surname Ferrero, there's also Ferrari, which is probably what everyone knows the most.
This is the second figure we're talking about.
He was born in 1898 and died in 1988.
When he was a kid, he was working in his father's office and he learned about cars and mechanics and so on.
Actually, it's said that he didn't even like to go to school.
In fact, he preferred to stay and work with his father rather than going to school.
He wasn't known as a good student.
And when his father died, unfortunately, he couldn't work there anymore, so he asked to be hired by Fiat, but they didn't.
So he wasn't always lucky.
He had to struggle a bit.
And then he later on found himself working for offices in Milan,
an office that actually took care of putting old and broken cars back to the streets.
So he had to test them and that's how he became a great pilot.
In fact, before working for Ferrari, as we know it nowadays, he was a pilot for races.
In fact, that's where he started actually changing parts of the car, working with his team
and then later on founding the Scuderia Ferrari, so the automaker Ferrari.
A fun fact about this is that the symbol, so you know the little horse on the cars,
is actually a symbol that came from one of his friends and it's called Cavallino Rampante.
Cavallino Rampante.
Cavallino is a small horse and Rampante is when he does that, right?
Number 3, we have Silvio Berlusconi.
Berlusconi.
Most of you probably know him as a politician, but that's not how he started.
He was born in 1936 and started his entrepreneurial career in the construction field
and later on in the media and communication field.
In fact, he was a pioneer in media channels.
You have to think that in 1976 when he started, channels on TV were owned by the state only
and there was also a law that only allowed the state to live broadcast programs on TV.
So private channels as well could not go live.
So what he did was recording the day before the actual broadcast of the program,
while other channels did that way before, not just the day before.
So it became so fresh, let's say, that people actually kind of believed that it was live
and became more interested in that than the state's channel.
He started with just one, which was Canale 5, so channel number 5,
and then also owned two more, Rete 4 and Italia 1, which is actually channel number 6.
So three of them and even more.
So he also had presses and radios, not to mention that he was also really involved in sports.
In fact, in 1986, he bought the soccer association AC Milan.
Only later on, just in 1996, he then entered politics.
So even before becoming famous as a politician,
he was really well known for being an entrepreneur.
And that's why he made it in this top 5 businessmen in Italy.
Now, moving from businessmen to businesswomen, we'll talk about Donatella Versace.
She was born in 1955 and after a degree in foreign languages,
she actually followed her brother in Florence, where she enrolled in a fashion school,
like her brother did.
She's known to be the muse of her brother, Gianni Versace,
who was the first to style and actually make and produce a collection of his own.
He was kind of the mentor for Donatella Versace.
And in 1978, they opened the first Versace boutique in Milan,
where she took care of all public relationships and communication.
Not to mention that she later on also became really involved in the producing of clothes as well.
In fact, when unfortunately her brother was murdered in 1997,
she then became the only head of Versace boutique.
And even though in 2018 Versace was sold to Capri Holdings,
she's still the only creative she.
There is no need to say what Versace is known for,
not only clothes but also accessories and as a brand itself,
because it has many collaborations with countless of famous people.
Probably the most famous one was in 2006, I believe, with Jennifer Lopez,
the green dress that was even later on shown in a museum.
Now, from Donatella Versace, which is also a great friend of this last figure
we're talking about, we can move to Chiara Ferragni.
I'm sure you all know her.
Forbes defined her the most powerful influencer all over the world.
She was born in 1987 and while she was studying law in Bocconi School in Milan,
she started to blog about fashion and her lifestyle in general.
It was 2009 when she officially started her blog called The Blonde Salad.
With her ex-boyfriend, actually, they invested basically 500 euros
for buying the domain of the website and in order to buy a camera and that was it.
And to think that now its value is more than 40 million dollars, it's insane, right?
So the blog started with posts about her lifestyle,
the fact that she liked to play with fashion and put together actually clothes
that weren't really seen together in the beginning.
She was really daring and that's how she began to be called at fashion shows also.
Even though in the beginning people didn't believe she would last,
as we all know today she did.
With the spread of Instagram, she began to post outfit looks only on the Instagram platform
and The Blonde Salad blog was only about lifestyle.
So people who were following her had to move to Instagram to see her
because that was a more immediate way to post about fashion
and to show what she was doing, what she was up to and that was a great move for her.
In fact, in 2010 she had her first shoe collection and then in 2013 her brand,
which is not only about shoes anymore but also clothes in general, makeup and jewellery as well.
In 2018 a documentary about her life came out on Amazon and last year, so 2021,
even a series about her family.
She is in fact married to Fedez, which is a famous rapper in Italy.
The both of them were awarded with Ambrosino Doro,
which is a prize given to people, to inhabitants of Milan from the city itself,
to people that are particularly involved in philanthropic actions.
In fact, the both of them, Chiara and Fedez, were really active during the pandemic
and started a lot of charity campaigns.
So these were the five top businessmen and women in Italy.
Let me know in the comments if you knew them already or if there are others
that you are more fond of and that you want to discuss about.
Also, if you haven't done it yet, make sure to go on ItalianPod101.com
and sign up for your free lifetime account.
Thank you for watching, I'll see you soon, ciao ciao, bye bye!
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