To study the evolution of Homo sapiens, we need to examine chimpanzees. If we want to understand Davos Man’s progression, we must go to Italy.
As much as anywhere, wealthy Italians have mastered the art of stashing their money beyond reach of the government. Tax evasion sometimes seems to rival soccer as the national sport—a reality that has bred cynicism within the populace, undermining governance, while making politics noisy, fractious, and prone to elevating incompetent opportunists.
Decades before Davos Man pursued his global pillaging, his forebears were perfecting the technique in Italy. Their looting of the public coffers has weakened the state’s ability to respond to crises like the pandemic, while limiting investment that could produce a more vibrant economy.
One company stands out as an especially pungent example of the Italian elite’s perversion of capitalism for its own benefit. Over generations, Italy’s most powerful people have exploited Fiat, stripping the giant automaker for personal enrichment at public expense.
No one played the con more aggressively than Gianni Agnelli, known throughout Italy as L’Avvocato—the Lawyer.
Born in the northern Italian city of Turin in 1921, Agnelli commanded popular fascination throughout his life. His grandfather founded Fiat, whose rise was emblematic of Italy’s miraculous recovery from the devastation of World War II. The company and the country had grown wealthy in tandem, applying their design and engineering prowess to produce objects that the world coveted.
Agnelli assumed control of the company in 1966. Fiat prospered as the middle class grew, supplying reliable and affordable cars. Its marketing wrapped itself in the flag: The company was Italian in the same way that Ford was American. By 1970, Fiat was making more than 1.4 million vehicles a year in Italy while employing one hundred thousand people.
“Agnelli is Fiat,”1 went a popular slogan, “Fiat is Turin, and Turin is Italy.”
The Agnellis were known as the Kennedys of Italy—their wealth, glamour, fame, brushes with tragedy, and tendency toward scandal operating in equal measure. Gianni favored escapades to the French Riviera behind the wheel of sports cars, and in the company of starlets. In a nation uniquely dedicated to fashion, he was an icon who flouted conventions. “He wore his tie askew2 and his watch atop his cuff to suggest sprezzatura—the Italian art of appearing not to care about one’s appearance—and to disconcert his rivals,” Esquire declared as it enshrined Agnelli on a list of “Best Dressed Men in the History of the World.”
He married another famous tastemaker, a half-American, half-Italian with a title attesting to her noble provenance—Donna Marella Caracciolo dei Principi di Castagneto. An art collector and a fabric designer, she was a frequent presence in fashion magazines. Their marriage was the subject of ceaseless gossip, enhanced by Agnelli’s dalliances with the socialite-cum-diplomat Pamela Harriman and Jackie Kennedy Onassis, the widow of the former American president John F. Kennedy.
At the height of his powers, Agnelli was celebrated as the king of Italian industry and the nation’s richest man, with a fortune estimated at more than $2 billion. His enterprises comprised more than one-fourth of the value of Italy’s stock markets while employing 360,000 people. He owned two of Italy’s most significant newspapers as well as one of the country’s most formidable soccer teams, Juventus. He acquired a controlling stake in Ferrari, a national icon, and led Fiat on a global expansion.
When he died of prostate cancer in 2003, two months shy of his eighty-second birthday, Agnelli’s funeral was broadcast live on national television. More than one hundred thousand people thronged Fiat’s headquarters for a final glimpse of his body before it was carried to Turin’s main cathedral.
Italy’s then prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi (a fellow billionaire), attended the ceremony. Pope John Paul II released a statement celebrating Agnelli as “an authoritative protagonist of some of the most important moments of Italian history.”
But six years after his death, Agnelli was revealed to be something else—a tax cheat of monumental proportions.
This came to light in 2009, as Agnelli’s daughter, Margherita Agnelli, filed a lawsuit against her own mother and several of her legal and financial advisers, accusing them of having hidden part of her father’s assets. The legal machinations pulled back the curtain on a secret that shook Italy. For years, Agnelli had salted away pieces of his fortune overseas.
The impressive haul3 was estimated at 1 billion euros, including luxury apartments scattered around the world, six in Paris alone. Agnelli had hidden his holdings in a tangle of foreign vehicles—a foundation in Liechtenstein, three companies chartered in the British Virgin Islands, and a pair of Swiss entities that contained holding companies in Amsterdam, Luxembourg, and Delaware.
Revered for supplying Italy with cars and paychecks, Agnelli had been quietly enriching accountants and lawyers tucked in every tax haven on earth.
Italian authorities went after Agnelli’s widow and daughter for tax evasion. They eventually settled with the state, though Margherita would again find herself having to account for wealth stashed overseas following the release of the Panama Papers—the trove of leaked documents that revealed how the world’s wealthiest people had hidden their treasure. The papers exposed4 that she, too, had established her own holding company in the British Virgin Islands, stocked with 1.5 billion euros.
By then, Italy had devolved from a shining example of postwar success into Europe’s most hapless major economy. Corruption festered as the Mafia retained its force. The country’s banks were stuffed with loans that would never be repaid, in part because they had been lent in support of dubious ventures run by politically connected overseers. Alarming levels of government debt—a hangover from a public spending binge in the 1980s—limited the state’s capacity to invest in education, health care, and infrastructure.
As a founding member of the European Union, Italy had adopted the euro currency in 1999, gaining the stability and discipline of a monetary system dominated by the debt-averse Germans. But the strict rules of the currency5 limited deficits, preventing the government from spending to promote growth.
Italy had never recovered from the 2008 global financial crisis—the result of Davos Man’s reckless gambling in the casino den of international banking. Grand-scale tax evasion and European prohibitions on deficit spending combined to starve the economy of capital, yielding stagnation.
As youth unemployment soared—exceeding 40 percent by 2013—young people fled, decamping for Britain and France in search of jobs. Many moved back in with their parents, deferring plans for careers and starting families, and contributing to a stark drop in the Italian birth rate. This itself deepened the cause for despair: as the population aged, that spelled fewer working-age people whose taxes could finance pensions and health care for retirees. These grim truths seeped into the Italian vernacular, prompting talk of lost decades, lost generations, lost dreams.
In the south of Italy, where an unremitting sense of economic depression was palpable, I met a twenty-nine-year-old named Elio Vagali, who had sustained himself by cleaning homes and picking tangerines—nearly always under the table, and without the protection of a full-time job. The measure of his desperation was reflected by his most fervent aspiration. He was eager for a job at the Ilva steel mill, a rusting complex in the city of Taranto, on the Ionian Sea. It had been implicated for a cancer cluster in the surrounding community. Vagali was willing to risk his health for a paycheck that would allow him to move out of his parents’ apartment. And still there was no position.
“You either know somebody, or you don’t get in,” Vagali told me when I met him in February 2018. “There’s nothing here for me.”
In the rest of Europe, Davos Man tended to exploit Italy as a cautionary tale as he battered away at union power and urged “fiscal restraint”—his favored term for spending cuts to finance tax cuts for himself. Davos Man would tell you that Italy was what happened when a government disregarded budget constraints while lavishing generous pensions on workers. The near impossibility of firing workers undermined Italy’s efforts to attract investment.
There was truth to these depictions. Italy’s labor protections were extraordinarily bureaucratic, limiting the growth of businesses. Its court system was hopelessly slow, a major reason that banks could not work out their bad debts: they often found it impossible to collect on the collateral. But much of what was wrong with Italy came down to a lack of growth and a shortage of government resources. And Italy’s lack of vigor and perpetually bleak finances were in large part the result of Davos Man’s depredations.
Technocrats in Rome had assented to demands for budget cuts from the European Union under the rules of the bloc. Austerity and tax evasion had combined to leave Italy perpetually short of funds. This helped explain why roads, bridges, and railroads were decaying, and how a sophisticated health care system would buckle in the face of the pandemic. Executives used political connections to gain public support for private companies and then pocketed the proceeds.
Faced with high debts and budget shortfalls, the government focused on improving tax collection to close the gap. In 2009, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi—later brought down himself by a tax evasion scandal—introduced a so-called tax shield that invited Italians who had hidden their money overseas to bring it home legally while surrendering a mere 5 percent to the government.
The scheme proved enticing for wealthy people operating in the shadows, and costly for the Italian state. The authorities dropped major investigations into tax evasion that might have netted substantial returns. They surrendered 700 million euros alone in ditching a case against Italians who had deposited their money in the coffers of HSBC’s banking operations6 in Switzerland.
Subsequent Italian administrations intermittently threatened war against tax evaders while proffering amnesty. Italy’s debts rose, its infrastructure deteriorated, and bitterness festered as the poor and middle class watched the country grow increasingly unequal.
By 2014, evasion of European value-added taxes7 alone was costing the Italian treasury upward of 37 billion euros, according to an estimate from the European Union.
Along the way, Fiat traced Italy’s decline, losing money, shedding jobs, and producing cars unwanted by consumers.
Its engineering skill had been supplanted by another talent—dexterity in pulling political strings to secure public largess.
Agnelli was briefly succeeded at Fiat by his brother Umberto. When he, too, died the following year, the company installed Sergio Marchionne as CEO.
Blunt, brash, and singularly devoted to the bottom line, Marchionne eschewed suits, favoring casual attire. He took over a company that was losing 5 million euros a day. Marchionne fired managers and slashed unprofitable businesses. He revealed himself as a Davos Man par excellence, displaying a knack for using crises to extract money from the government.
In August 2005, while most of Italy was at the beach, Marchionne paid a visit to Berlusconi at his residence in Rome. Fiat was considering shuttering its remaining factories in Italy, Marchionne warned, a step that would eliminate tens of thousands of jobs. The only alternative was a public rescue. Marchionne demanded an immediate infusion8 of cash—more than 130 million euros—plus government subsidies for research and development programs, and tax incentives for consumers to buy its cars. Otherwise, Berlusconi would find himself having to explain why Italy’s hallmark company was Italian no more.
Berlusconi agreed. By October 2005, Fiat was profitable again, and paying out dividends to shareholders. Emboldened by this success, Marchionne repeated the gambit, threatening layoffs to secure public aid. He persuaded the government to take responsibility for the bulk of paychecks at a Fiat plant outside Naples. Italy even handed the company money to expand abroad9. Despite public assistance, Fiat shuttered a factory in Sicily, spelling layoffs for 1,500 workers.
Marchionne’s most consequential undertaking was a merger that would reorient Italy’s place in the global economy: Fiat took over Chrysler, one of the Big Three automakers in the United States. From the moment that deal was completed in 2014, Fiat’s shares began trading on the New York Stock Exchange, giving global investors greater influence over wage and working conditions at Italy’s most prominent company. At the same time, Fiat formally ditched Italy, legally establishing itself in the United Kingdom10.
Agnelli had been known to remark that the I and the T in Fiat’s name were a testament to the company’s unbreakable bond with Italy. But those ties could not withstand the allure of lower taxes in Britain, especially on capital gains, which enabled the company to hand out fatter dividends to shareholders.
The combination of Italian state aid and diminished wages was supposed to have made Fiat more competitive, generating jobs and future tax receipts. But the move to Britain meant that Fiat would pay the bulk of its taxes there.
In the decade after Marchionne assumed the helm, Fiat’s Italian workforce shrunk from more than 44,000 to about 23,000. Half of the remaining workers were covered by a special state-regulated system in which Fiat was able to pay them below their contractual rate.
One employee was prospering, however. Marchionne became the highest-paid CEO in Italy11, collecting more than 46 million euros in total compensation in 2017, including stock grants and a bonus. That package was a reward from the people whose interests he had diligently served—shareholders.
Fiat’s fate signaled that Italy had been conquered by Davos Man. Years of taxpayer rescues and support schemes had subsidized a multinational corporation that now distributed its bounty to shareholders in London, New York, and other faraway centers of affluence, while abandoning the communities and workers that had nurtured it.
Davos Man’s comprehensive pillaging of Italy and the country’s loss of vibrancy played out gradually over decades. The country’s decline eroded faith in institutions and the governing elite. By 2019, 77 percent of Italians12 described the economic situation as bad, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center, while 73 percent said the country’s elected leaders were not concerned about the situation for ordinary people. This opened a path for cynical politicians who pinned the blame for Italy’s troubles not on the insiders who had looted the country, but on faceless outsiders.
Much as Trump’s ascent in the United States had been propelled in part by deepening anger among the white working class, right-wing extremists in Italy exploited the dearth of economic opportunities as they rode to power. And just as Trump drew votes by stirring up baseless fears of immigrants, the Italian right drew strength by blaming migrants from Africa for home-cooked problems.
As growing numbers of migrants began landing on Italian shores in 2014, Matteo Salvini, leader of a party called the League, used the influx as a springboard to prominence. His simplistic prescription for Italy’s challenges—stop immigration—and his racist appeals to cultural chauvinism ignored the root causes of popular distress: corruption, tax evasion, and austerity. He spared Davos Man blame, while training his wrath on foreigners.
The effectiveness of his pitch rested on the enduring appeal of tribalism in a country in which the economy had long ceased functioning for many working people. Salvini and other right-wing extremists prospered by offering a seemingly coherent, if bogus, narrative for what had happened to the Italian middle class.
You could see this transformation in places like Prato, a city in the central region of Tuscany, where voters had long supported the political left, but were suddenly lurching right.
Prato was a textile town in the same way that Granite City was a steel town. Edoardo Nesi possessed a commanding view over the whole works. His villa perched in the hills above the city looked directly down on the source of his family’s wealth—the textile mill started by his grandfather.
Nesi spent his days running the textile business and his nights penning novels. The walls of the family villa were lined with bookshelves crammed with poetry, art volumes, and leftist explorations of economics. His father had been a lover of Beethoven, literature, and timely accounts payable. He bestowed on his son a lucrative arrangement that comprised three-fourths of the business. They sent wool to overcoat manufacturers in Germany that paid unfailingly, ten days after delivery.
“My father said, ‘Go to school and then come to work for me and everything will be good,’” Nesi told me. “‘We have always had success. You will have it, too.’ He kept telling me how simple it was, just deliver good quality in time. That was the secret. We lived in a place where everything had been good for forty years. Nobody was afraid of the future.”
Over centuries, Prato had amassed wealth as a center of high-end textiles. It had a network of canals that had been laid down by the Romans, allowing the waters of the Bisenzio River to be diverted as needed.
After World War II, people poured into the mills from the surrounding countryside. At first, the local plants churned out inexpensive woolen blankets. Then they shifted to fabrics of varying heft and texture, adding synthetics that stretched and shimmered. By the 1980s, the fashion houses of Milan were sending designers to Prato to collaborate on new fibers, as the local mills yielded fabric for Armani, Versace, Dolce & Gabbana, and other icons of the realm. Local entrepreneurs watched runway models wearing their creations on catwalks in Paris and felt indomitable.
“We thought we were the best in the world,” said Nesi. “Everybody was making money.”
The fruits of Prato’s wealth were shared widely because of the dominance of the Communist Party. Despite its Marxist trappings and solidarity with the Soviet Union, the party was not oriented to overthrow capitalism. It was leftist in the same way as Nordic countries like Denmark, its leaders intent on parceling out the gains of economic growth to ensure that everyone could afford a home, a steak on the grill, a car. Local unions ensured high wages and comfortable working conditions. The Communists used their power over the purse strings to deliver public works, including a library and a textile museum.
But by the 1990s, Nesi’s German customers were purchasing cheaper fabrics woven in the former East Germany, Bulgaria, and Romania. Then, they began buying fabric from China, where similar material could be procured for less than half the price of Prato’s.
By 2000, Nesi’s business was struggling to break even. The following year, China entered the World Trade Organization. “Suddenly, the orders stopped,” he said.
Prato experienced a punishment that it had previously meted out to others. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the city’s artisans had begun importing used woolen clothing from around the world and respinning it into fresh yarn that was much cheaper than alternatives, allowing them to undercut competitors in France and England.
But the scale and ambition of China’s rise was unprecedented. Factories in coastal cities like Shanghai and Guangzhou were buying the same German-made machinery used by the mills in Prato. They were hiring Italian consultants who were instructing them on the modern arts of the trade. Prato’s 6,000 textile companies shrank to 3,000. A textile workforce13 that had reached 40,000 plunged to 19,000.
Just as in Granite City, the ensuing misery prompted angry talk about globalization and the impossibility of competing with China. But China was merely the means by which Davos Man realized the maximization of profits for his own gain. The squeeze was coming from multinational businesses that dominated the apparel trade.
Nesi’s German customers faced relentless pressure to drop their prices as a new breed of retailer took over their industry—companies that answered to shareholders. Enormous brands like Zara and H&M were increasingly using low-wage factories in Asia to make their goods.
Zara had been founded by a reclusive Spaniard named Amancio Ortega, who forged a conglomerate called Inditex that would become the world’s largest collection of clothing retailers. Born in 1936 in the northwest of Spain, Ortega had worked as a delivery boy for a store that sold men’s shirts, and then as an assistant to a tailor, before launching his own clothing outlet, catering to the wealthy. By 1975, he had opened his first Zara store and was pioneering a concept known as fast fashion: he employed a team of trendspotters14 who scoured fashion runways for promising new looks and then copied them, rushing cut-rate versions into stores only weeks later. Zara sold its wares15 in sleek, elegant stores strategically located near luxury brands like Gucci and Chanel, using proximity to capture their allure.
Though Inditex kept much of its production in Spain, its growing reliance on factories in China kept its wages low. This is how Ortega turned himself into the richest person most people had never heard of, a man who supposedly favored eating in the company cafeteria, even as he accrued a fortune estimated at $55 billion16.
H&M was the world’s second largest clothing retailer and another fast-fashion icon. Launched in Sweden in 1947 by a man named Erling Persson, it began as a women’s clothing retailer. By the early 1980s, the founder’s son, Stefan Persson, was in charge and leading the company on a global expansion. Its foreign dealings brought disclosures of exploitation—workers allegedly passing out in the face of chemical fumes at a factory making clothes in Cambodia, child laborers found in the company’s Myanmar plant. Not coincidentally, the profits were vast, supplying Persson with wealth17 estimated at $13.5 billion.
Back in Prato, Nesi’s sales evaporated. He even tried his hand at making clothes for Zara, but was exasperated by the ceaseless demands for lower prices.
“You started to work on how to pervert your own quality in order to sell it to Zara,” Nesi said. “It had to be something that looks like your quality without actually being it. That’s more or less a description of what they wanted our life to become—something that looks like your life, but is of lesser quality.”
He sold the business in 2004, ahead of what seemed an inevitable collapse, in order to spare his father from “an old age full of shame.”
As he recounted the story fifteen years later over plates of pasta at his dining room table, his sadness over the ending remained palpable.
“My father was my idol,” Nesi said. “I used to think that my father made his temple and I ruined the temple, because I couldn’t find a way to sell. Then I realized how my problem was very common. Many other companies were not able to sell their fabrics anymore.”
Down in the flatlands of Prato, Roberta Travaglini, a sixty-one-year-old mother of two grown boys, had become dependent on handouts from her parents’ pensions to buy groceries. She had also developed a passion for the Italian right, and a tendency to explain her loss of station with racist jeremiads about the people she blamed—the Chinese workers who had set up shop in the failed textile mills, the African immigrants who loitered at a park strip outside her apartment.
Travaglini and nearly everyone in her family had worked in the local textile factories, and had been unwavering supporters of the political left. She had fond memories of the boisterous Communist Party rallies her father had taken her to as a child, the gatherings amid music, dancing, and free-flowing wine.
But when I met her in Prato in the spring of 2019, Travaglini had been out of work for three years. She was cadging odd jobs fixing clothes for people in her neighborhood, using the workshop on the ground floor of her parents’ apartment. She was disgusted by the influx of Chinese immigrants and the success of their businesses. They were importing fabric from China, stitching up clothes, and selling their finished wares at street fairs in Paris, capturing premium prices by affixing a valuable label—Made in Italy.
Products with that label should be made by Italians, she hissed, and Chinese people would never be included in that identity. Not even the children of immigrants, who were born and educated in Prato, spoke native Italian, and were increasingly expanding from garment sewing into sophisticated design work, launching their own brands.
There were jobs to be found in the Chinese-owned factories, but Travaglini had not bothered to apply. “I don’t think it’s fair that they come to take jobs away from Italians,” she said. “Ideologically, I fight against this, so I can’t go to work there.”
This was nonsense. Before the influx of Chinese immigrants, Prato’s failed factories had sat empty. Now they were full of the sound of clattering sewing machines. Far from preying on Prato, the immigrants were an engine of revival.
“We are doing jobs that Italians are not willing to do,” said Sang Wei, who had arrived fourteen years earlier from Anhui, one of China’s poorest provinces, opening a restaurant that sold takeaway containers of rice and vegetables. “We work harder. We get up first thing in the morning every day, seven days a week, and we are here from 6 a.m. until 8 p.m. Italian people are not going to do this.”
Prato was by many estimates home to the largest community of Chinese in Europe. Travaglini patronized their businesses, buying discount clothes at a boutique near her apartment. But she spoke of immigrants as a symptom of Italian decay—of globalization gone awry, of her own vulnerability in an age in which national leaders no longer cared about people like her. In the previous year’s national elections, she had cast her vote for Salvini’s party.
In the years after the global financial crisis, the party Salvini headed—then known as the Northern League—swept into power in Prato. It launched a crackdown on the Chinese-owned factories. It used nighttime raids on the plants18 to harass workers, while decrying “illegal immigration” as the source of economic decline.
In its current incarnation, the party was focused on the latest arrivals—immigrants landing on Italian beaches from North Africa, fleeing wars in Syria, Afghanistan, and Somalia. Salvini pointed at their Muslim faith and warned that Europe was in danger of becoming “an Islamic caliphate.”19 He described migration as an “invasion” that threatened Italians with “ethnic cleansing.”20 Like Trump, he presented himself as a corrective to global integration, an unapologetic nationalist who would rescue the dispossessed from what had become of the Italian left, long since metamorphosed into a distant elite.
To Travaglini’s ear, Salvini was offering an accounting of what had happened to her life. “We are in the hands of the world elites, who want to keep us poorer and poorer,” Travaglini told me. “When I was young, it was the Communist Party that was protecting the workers, that was protecting our social class. Now, it’s the League that is protecting the people.”
Salvini had already secured a place in the government, in an ill-fated coalition headed by the spectacularly inept Five Star movement. Then he overreached, bringing the government down on the bet that this would trigger elections. Instead, Five Star had found another coalition partner, leaving Salvini an outsider. Still, he remained a force, biding his time until the next elections.
Tuscany, Umbria, Marche, and Emilia-Romagna—four Italian provinces that had elected Communists as recently as the 1980s, and then reliably supported center-left candidates—were more recently elevating far-right parties.
The abandonment of the left could be read as a sign that its program worked only so long as there were gains to distribute. When lean times came—when there were no paychecks to share—the left had no answer, opening an opportunity for the right.
But why were there not enough jobs?
It had nothing to do with Chinese immigrants filling Prato. They were creating jobs.
It had nothing to do with migrants from North Africa, whose arrival came years after Italy descended into a moribund state.
The imprints of Davos Man were everywhere—tax evasion, financial shenanigans, the looting of the system by the powerful.
The extreme right hardly talked about these things. Its prescriptions for lifting living standards were minimal and incoherent. It gained influence by playing on fear and promising to revive a comforting image of Italy’s past, centered on halting the influx of outsiders.
It had forged an emotional connection with the dispossessed, people who could be reached with nativist rhetoric. Those who earned their living with their hands understood that their lives and security were shaped by forces beyond national borders. Salvini projected the illusion of being able to restore control.
Looking down on his family’s former textile factory from above Prato, Nesi was pained by this turn. He disdained the extreme right as a regressive turn. But he understood that this was precisely their appeal.
“It’s the power of nostalgia,” he told me.
The year after he sold the mill, Nesi’s daughter, then ten, dragged him into H&M, eager to buy an overcoat.
“The shop was fantastic,” he recalled. “Very well lit, beautiful people inside, and the clothes were beautiful. But I was seeing them from thirty meters away. And every step I was taking, I was seeing something wrong.
“Then I touched the clothes,” Nesi continued. “The fabric was very bad. Then you looked at the price, and you could see that it’s less than half of what you would pay in any other shop, and you could see that the Western world is finished.”
But that takeaway was merely a high-grade version of the cultural arrogance that prevented Italy from reckoning with its problems. Nesi’s family business had not been taken down by “the East” or globalization, or other nebulous terms that really meant unfair competition from China. Zara and H&M were, in fact, European companies. It was not their provenance that explained Prato’s torment, but rather the way in which these companies were organized—as a means of maximizing returns to shareholders above all other considerations.
Nesi’s diminished legacy did not reflect the supposed failure of Western civilization. It was a testament to how one select group had monopolized the gains. Prato had been decimated by Davos Man.
The nostalgia Nesi identified as fuel for the extremist right reflected a popular yearning for a time when Italians could take their middle-class station for granted. The people who had taken that away were not across an ocean. They were all around—in government offices in Rome, in elegant villas in next-door Florence, and in the other redoubts for Davos Men, who diverted the labors and savings of Italians into their private bank accounts.
Nostalgia was politically potent, a way to mobilize people far beyond Italy. On the other side of the English Channel, a renegade faction of Davos Men used it to sabotage Britain’s place in the global economy for personal gain.