Tommaso Ebhardt

"In 1961 he packed his backpack and left, and in the following sixty years, "the duration of my solitary adventure", as Bonatti writes, "it is as if I lived on another planet, as if I had entered another unknown dimension, as if I had entered a mystical and visionary state where the impossible does not exist and everything can succeed"."

"He has taken the concept of vertical integration to the extreme, raised the excellence of industrial quality production, and transformed his passion into a team capable of competing for the oldest trophy in the world of sports."

"Yet up close, she is a shy lady, petite, with a contagious laugh, surrounded by friends with whom she questions the meaning of things, the future of society, and the role of art. She is super chic without ever being flashy, uses her work to send signals and provocations, and her Foundation to produce food for the mind, especially for the younger ones."

"The coming years will be decisive in shaping the entrepreneurial future of our country; the patriarchs of family capitalism are inevitably forced to hand over control due to age reasons, and the activities they have created are often a direct expression of their personalities: drawing their future, once the founders are no longer there, risks becoming a matter of life or death. Not to mention the scale. Size does matter, indeed. The "small is beautiful" no longer exists, and in our country, in many sectors - luxury and fashion being among the main ones - we do not have companies capable of competing in size with the world leaders."

"He has taken the concept of vertical integration to the extreme, raised the excellence of industrial quality production, and transformed his passion into a team capable of competing for the oldest trophy in the world of sports."

"Meanwhile, the world is being turned upside down by the coronavirus pandemic. The first objective becomes securing the safety of its own employees but also the surrounding communities: masks, laboratories for testing open to citizens. The difficulties, paradoxically, create a first true group spirit and bring organizations closer. The 2020 assembly, the last in which Leonardo feared ambushes, goes off smoothly. There are other, greater problems for humanity."

""Don't just follow the trend but use the approach of scientists, get to the fundamental principles. Only then can you understand if what you're about to do makes sense.""

"Del Vecchio is their captain and coach on the field. He knows how to create a team and invents something new every day. He demands a lot but makes everyone feel involved, ready to also indulge in some whims."

"It's always the same motivation, the survival instinct, moving before the others to anticipate the risk of being overwhelmed. Relaxation is not possible, you have to fight every single day, he learned that in the barracks of the boarding school, on the white roads of the outskirts of Milan. Of course, the move is risky. Leonardo is not afraid, even though for many the step seems bigger than the leg."

"Andrea – it's his philosophy – arrives alone, does not bring a team of trusted people. "He tours the locations that the group has scattered around the world, from Turkey to China, from Spain to the United States. Then he started to make decisions, and in February 2005, he will also begin to appear," so describes his first one hundred and fifty days."

""Everyone looks at the technical part, I look for something that isn't learned in school: it's knowing how to communicate, it's not enough to know the product. I see it, in the departments that work better there is a leader who, in addition to being a technician, is also able to communicate with the workers. It's a quality that cannot be taught," he says in the book by Brunetti and Camuffo."

"Not him; he realizes that he is skilled, that the quality of his products is not easily matched by other manufacturers."

"Francavilla tells the story, though he doesn't speak a word of English, that in 1973 they receive a call from an important American customer. The nose pads on five thousand frames were assembled backwards. Luigi grabs his tools, hops on the first plane with a worker, and dashes to the United States to personally change the nose pads on all five thousand frames. They manage it in one night. Agordo-United States, round trip in the shortest possible time, to return to oversee the production."

"He is closer to ninety than eighty and always speaks of the future."

"major acquisitions continue to strengthen the company's dominant position."

""Glasses for me are the complement of a style, a mirror of the personality. I prefer them light, with an essential design and never invasive. Only in this way do they become one with the person wearing them, a light filter to capture the smallest of nuances, the frame through which to observe the world," he recounted in 2021 at the presentation of the Icon model. Armani becomes the flagship brand of the group."

"It is also established that the family holding company needs a qualified majority of 88% to approve significant changes. Therefore, an agreement among all the heirs is necessary to modify its strategy or leadership."

"In the morning there's no way to arrive before him. Often he's up when it's still dark. When he's alone, he goes around the departments, checking the workshop's machines."

""I don't have my own office, I'm always in those of others, around the factory, and I talk directly with everyone, explaining why and how we do things this way. I go to my department heads and ask them as well: 'Why do we do it this way?' That way they learn and know how to pass it on.""

"Purchase the Italian distributor of Luxottica products: Scarrone SpA of Turin. Scarrone, with its six agents, opens the Italian market directly to Luxottica. It also represents for Del Vecchio the way to face the domestic arena from which he was essentially excluded. "I began to suffer from the fact of not being present and not selling in Italy, and so I bought one of the best retailers in our market." For opticians and many of its competitors, it is practically heresy, it breaks an unwritten rule. For Luxottica it is also a great opportunity to learn, a learning experience from other realities that allows Del Vecchio to know all aspects of his sector. For him, it is the first direct experience in sales and marketing. To manage the subsidiary he puts a trusted person, his older brother Michele, who joins him from Milan, where he manages a drugstore."

"Every expansion "will be the last, I swear. Never again..." and after a few months, it's back to square one, Goldoni recounts in his book. The reason is simple. The demand for Luxottica frames is growing at whirlwind rates, more than 20% each year."

"Leonardo is a trench man, a factory man. He always has a host of employees following him step by step, taking notes while he talks, invents, discusses with a department head, consults with a model maker, questions a planner."

""What counts is what one does, not what one says." CESARE PAVESE, The House on the Hill"

"Del Vecchio didn't know what to do, becoming a minority shareholder would have meant castrating his ambitions. On one hand, he felt that this was his great opportunity, on the other, he feared that he would find himself once again under a boss."

""Playing an away game was the only guarantee not to end up in the factory on Sunday with him as well," recounts one of the first employees at the pensioners' circle, right behind the main square. "If we played at home, by the end of the match just a look was enough," and you already knew that it was necessary to go back to work, to finish an order before he left at four in the morning to make deliveries to Milan."

"It seems to me to go back to those evenings in the tavern, my sisters talking about Candy Candy, me secretly listening to the family friends discussing the next deal. They were all convinced they were going to become billionaires, that luck was just around the corner, that a friend of a friend had found a sector where success was guaranteed."

"For Leonardo, it is a fundamental day, the day of freedom, of emancipation, the possibility to finally pursue his own dreams without having to report to anyone. It is a moment of great joy."

""It's not worth continuing to argue. There's one year left and then it's over," he tells me at our first meeting in 2020. After three years of forced cohabitation regulated by equal governance agreements, in the spring of 2021 the shares finally count, Del Vecchio is able to assert the influence of his relative controlling stake and make one of his most important decisions, with the appointment of Francesco Milleri to lead the entire group. "We modernized Luxottica, we have to do the same with Essilor," he tells me confidently a year away from the expiration of the pact. "When I came back to lead the group in 2014, I had to fix many things, it took us six years to restructure the company. Now we will do the same with Essilor.""

"They start with the grinding of lenses imported from France, to be inserted into metal frames produced in Vienna. Water is the driving force that moves the mechanisms in a rudimentary way, especially the grinding wheel, to produce the first metal spectacles. A small mill in the middle of the woods, far from railways, from inhabited centers, and from industrial ones."

""We transform bread and mediocrity into bread and excellence," he says. "I have the fortune of managing the most beautiful company in the world for ten years. We are in a completely different world. In Italy, we call it a crisis, in reality, it's a new world. The opportunities are obvious: three billion new consumers. Not only that, we are living through a tremendous industrial revolution, no technological paradigm that was valid in the nineties is still valid today, everything is possible, everything can be communicated," continues Guerra, inspired. "How do we achieve excellence? Two things: culture and education, nothing else. Are we doing politics? Yes, we are doing politics. Our supplementary welfare is political, it wants to create a different social context in the places where we operate. We ask our workers for a completely different job than before, flexibility, shifts constantly disrupted...""

""But I didn't set out to get where I've arrived with difficulty," he says shyly in a video from a decade ago for the celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of the group's founding. "I set out only to improve my conditions." One step at a time with an idea that gradually becomes clearer. Starting out is a leap into the void, an impulsive choice without a parachute, except for the confidence in one's own skills as an engraver and printer. "At twenty-six you have this courage, if they asked me now I definitely wouldn’t do it," Del Vecchio candidly explains in 2011. From Milan to Agordo without looking back. Never."

"sion. The cleanliness of the factory is a must. The machines always had to be shiny; he would run his finger over them to check. If there were no extra sales, on Saturday mornings everyone would go to the company to clean."

""The boss is a steamroller who sets himself new and exciting goals," one of the managers from those years explains to me. "He teaches you and gives you confidence, knows how to charge you up in the right way. But he never gives up, never." You are sucked into his project, his creative destruction at a steady pace. "He has an accelerated concept of time," another manager tells me. "In recent years, even more so." He is the CEO but also the head of department, foreman, commercial office, and planning and control. He notices every smallest detail. It's useless to try to hide anything from him, the only thing that really drives him crazy."

"The admission document is a radiography of the family's poverty, but at the same time, of the dignity of mother Grazia. > Does the child have any capital tied up? No. Is he healthy? Yes. Is there a guardian? There is no guardian. Does he have any brothers or sisters? He has two sisters and a brother, the eldest is married. The youngest is twelve years old, and the other brother is fourteen years old. There are no relatives who can contribute to the payment of the boarding fee. Information on the mother's morality: Good. Does anyone else work in the family, other than the mother? No. The decision is made the same day. "It is urgent to shelter the minor because he is completely abandoned during the day.""

"In Europe, a survey conducted on four thousand opticians confirms that the merger will not have consequences on competition, which does not feel threatened. In the United States, there are no reasons to hinder."

"Children from that period "remember the 50 lire a week they received in elementary school and the seaside in a colony," few luxuries and frills, much substance. "No kisses, no cuddles. Frankly, we were afraid of him," says Marisa to Goldoni."

"That's exactly why among his managers he has a team that spends their days looking for new targets, exploring new possibilities. "We have a team that constantly works on acquisitions, looks for new opportunities, evaluates markets where we can grow. There is still much to do, vast expanses especially in Asia," the man whose company has a decisive influence on the future of the optical industry worldwide tells me, producing over a hundred million glasses a year: 275,000 a day, Saturdays and Sundays included."

"I find him, in front of ultra-flat screens, intent on listening to the explanations of his technicians. In the air, there's a sense of trepidation from the employees for the president's visit. At eighty-six, he has not lost his instinct: to look ahead, to dominate the future, to move before the others."

"⁠The orphan who became an industrialist, some of his competitors would call him "the hawk," like the main character of the novel by Sveva Casati Modignani that seems tailor-made for him.⁠"

"He has the instinct on his side. He understands what is right to do, and, his people say, he is always right. It’s like being in front of a blackboard with lots of dots, he knows how to connect them and make sense of it."

"⁠"He put us all together in the same melting pot where he was too," the kids of the Sixties tell you.⁠"

"In a country accustomed to silence, he immediately stood out for his enormous negotiating skills, for his enterprise, his thirst for knowledge."

"⁠"In things, one is often dragged along. They are not real choices," he explains, or at least they do not seem so at the moment you make them. "I started by making a mold, then this turned out to be the best product on the market and everything began to develop on its own."⁠"

"The signature forcefully enters into the Agordo factory. And this is just the first step. In the following years, Luxottica strings together a series of agreements to expand its portfolio: Valentino, Yves Saint Laurent, and then Emporio Armani as well."

"He also sees too much power concentrated in a single manager and would like to put an executive alongside for part of the business."

"Once the lenses are integrated into the group and a retail distribution chain in Europe is added, his "factory" can really feel secure as it faces the challenge of the digital revolution."

"Del Vecchio speaks little, but in his choices, he is even less "fashionable." For years, he has challenged all the taboos of the industry, one by one, not simply content to follow the market. He is able to get to the essence of problems, in front of which his choices become simple, almost obvious, one of his young managers explains to me."

""The problem with Italy has always been that: one stops at the first success and stops innovating, going beyond one's borders, moving forward. But we had the desire to do so and look where we’ve arrived," he explains to me simply."

"In an extremely lively productive fabric, the excellences emerge. The Benettons, in Treviso, build the empire of the sweaters that will lead them to become one of the most influential holdings in the country with the privatizations of the nineties. It all begins with a yellow sweater that Luciano Benetton has knitted by his sister Giuliana; from that sweater is born the king of sweaters. "It was all there for the taking, you just had to have an idea, hope for luck, fear nothing," Luciano tells Natalia Aspesi in Repubblica on the occasion of the group's fortieth anniversary, in 2006."

""What you don't take for yourself, others will take from you," he will explain to me with a calm and determined voice. "You mustn't nurture potential competitors. If you get distracted or rest on your laurels, as I've seen several entrepreneurs who started with me do, without even realizing it, someone comes along to snatch your market away from you. It becomes very, very difficult to recover once they have overtaken you.""

"Now he can think about what to do together with the boys who dominate the future, like Mark Zuckerberg, who came all the way to Agordo to see his factory, with whom he designed the glasses of tomorrow."

". The task is not easy, nobody in the village rented houses all year round, but only those for vacationers. Before this, nobody had ventured there for work reasons. From Agordo, you just left and that was it. Francavilla is the first to reverse this trend in a land used to seeing its children grow up far from home."

""Finally, after fifty years of waiting, two naturally complementary parts, frames and lenses, will be designed, produced, and distributed under the same roof," the statement reads."

""We will demonstrate how much it's worth, when the American label will be restructured and integrated," he explained in those days."

"From the general to the particular, and vice versa."

""I can follow every model we sell, what sells the most in a particular store, it's the program we use with the executives, we have the rankings of each country, of each line, we keep everything under control.""

"⁠He virtually never sleeps, travels by night, works by day, works by evening. Exhausting. "I went to bed at midnight. At three I took the car and off to Volta Mantovana, where I worked all day. In the evening, I went back to my activity. I was on my feet by sheer force of 'simpamina'," he recounts in the book about the company's thirty years.⁠"

"Leonardo explains to me that maintaining entrepreneurial freedom was important to him. He was young but had very clear ideas about his future."

"Initiative, desire to go further, to seek new paths, to grow are the traits that distinguish him."

"During the Guerra era, accusations against Luxottica had been made by one of America's most important television programs, 60 Minutes. The thesis is that, by controlling the major sales chains and the production of the most prestigious brands, Luxottica can arbitrarily set the price of its products, creating a fake competition behind which lies an actual market monopoly."

"Leonardo sketches an identikit of the ideal candidate: "A person with a basic culture, who knows languages, who has worked in large-scale retail or in a multinational. We want people who come to us to give us what we lack, which is schooling." Again emerges his great regret, that of not having studied, the lack of culture that makes him feel inferior compared to the great entrepreneurs who had the opportunity to be educated in university classrooms, not just on the workbenches of the workshop."

"When he returns with lunch for the other workers, he stops at every single workstation and looks, studies. He tries to capture the secrets of the various processes, the ways in which the more experienced execute each step, the little great secrets of the craftsmen."

"In the photos of that day, you see Mister New Economy with a brisk pace and casual clothes next to an entrepreneur who has been on the forefront since the 1950s."

"In the workshop, they prepare eight metal models. Simple, elegant, and essential frames. Well made. Storing them, lined up in the gallery of all Luxottica models in a dedicated room in the headquarters in Agordo, they make the effect of Steve Jobs's first Mac. A product that starts an icon."

"It's no wonder that when the Milanese bursts into the valley in the early sixties, with his energy and his four machines, the inhabitants of the area think of anything but working in a factory. His is the first "company" in the village, and at the beginning, it is viewed by the mountaineers with a certain distrust, he recounts."

"When the French managers realize that, despite the headquarters and listing remaining in Paris, it will be the Italians who take the helm of the group, they begin an all-out battle."

"He distances himself from the factory, even considers moving to London. For a while, he travels back and forth to the British capital, looking for a home in the chic areas. He tries to transform himself from craftsman-president to shareholder-president. He struggles to adopt a role different from the one he has built over fifty years of work, he is a frontline man who tries to stay in the background. Difficult."

""I either become rich or I close," he tells a friend during those days."

"Essentially, he has the opportunity to transform a "commodity" product into a customized one, a fortune that happens to few entrepreneurs, who often, instead, are forced to fight in a context that levels profits rather than expanding them. Some negotiations are initiated with fashion groups, leading up to meeting Armani. The Milanese designer had had negative experiences with other producers in prior years who did not guarantee him adequate quality. A very tough negotiation begins, which lasts for months, with Chemello and Francavilla going back and forth between Agordo and Milan to discuss with Armani's lawyer."

"⁠Throughout the sixties, the factory mainly produces components for glasses on behalf of other companies: temples, metal frames, all handcrafted accessories. And molds, at the beginning, it's mainly about the molds.⁠"

"In Venice, ladies and gentlemen were already using them in the 18th century, when moving in gondolas along the canals. "Glasses for ladies" to shield the eyes and not damage the whiteness of the noblewomen's complexion from the sun's reflection on the water. Even the doges wore them."

"With the professional course, he found a master ready to take him as an apprentice; it's a medal factory on Corso di Porta Nuova, where he can put into practice his talents as an engraver and printer."

""The difference between me and many entrepreneurs who started with me? They felt they had made it when they could afford the apartment by the sea, in Jesolo. I never got tired of moving forward.""

"In industrialized nations, over 70% of adults use glasses, not considering the over two billion women and men in India, other Asian countries, and Africa who have visual deficits but still cannot access the optical industry: an immense need and an endless market that continues to grow."

"You MUST climb to the top. One step after another, following the paths of the ancestors, struggling on the scree, eyes looking upward."

"Everyone searches for their reason for being, the young Del Vecchio finds it in work."

"As we know, he has never liked to ask for discounts, to negotiate on price."

"There is a happy ending to the divorce between two of the greatest entrepreneurs of our country. "I realized how the high manufacturing quality, the attention to detail, and the combination of technology and craftsmanship ensured by Luxottica, in addition to the market penetration capacity, were unparalleled. This brought back the desire to collaborate, and the renewed successes were confirmation that it was the right choice," Armani says to me. Under the guidance of Andrea Guerra, Luxottica ten years later wins back King George."

"⁠He did all the engravings at the beginning himself.⁠"

"in order to guarantee it a stable and lasting future, even when he would be no longer there, he must follow one of the best practices of family capitalism: separating ownership from management, shareholders from the management team, a golden rule of the great families of the bourgeois aristocracy, like the Agnellis."

"At a certain point during lunch, De Bortoli on Corriere reports, Del Vecchio asks Hubert who will take over after the first three years of transition. "Me," the Frenchman replies sharply. Del Vecchio's eyes pop out, this is just not right. "I was dumbfounded," recalls the number one of Luxottica, "but I continued to converse as if nothing had happened. We bid each other farewell cordially." Del Vecchio is very kind, Hubert believes he has closed a deal and found an agreement."

"The truth is that there are no mergers without winners or losers, there is always a part that prevails over the other, a management team, an ownership."

"Rest is not an option. When he really can't take it anymore, he helps himself with simpamina, which many used at the time. It was sold in pharmacies, even the domestiques of Fausto Coppi took it at the Giro. It helps to stay awake and focused. It is actually amphetamine, a drug in every respect, produced by Recordati and sold freely until 1972, without any prescription."

"Almost ten kilometers by bike, through Sempione Park, to the factory, passing in front of the villas of the sciuri before the Triennale, without even dreaming that one of the most beautiful would become his fifty years later. He sees his first paycheck, earns "300 lire per ten days as an apprentice engraver and draughtsman." Not much, the pay of a worker is about 2,000 lire a month, but meanwhile he pockets his first earnings."

""The company has changed more in the last ten years than in the first fifty. That's why I’ve come back, because we were standing still while the digital revolution was there to be embraced. We succeeded," he acknowledges, and with his arms, he indicates the newly inaugurated complex. "And I have little to do with it," he adds with his usual modesty. "I had to change, to trust people that I didn't even know, experts in e-commerce, internet, new technologies for vision, for frames and, now, also for lenses.""

"He fears that Luxottica has become a normalized company, one of those where some managers only look after their own garden, ignoring the big goals, they look at their own finger and miss the moon."

"They did not understand that they were bringing a true disruptor into their home – the genius destroyer of the status quo –, an entrepreneur capable of conquering market leadership, of outliving their own company and dozens of others that prevailed in those years, of gradually taking market share. Of never being satisfied."

""You know, sometimes I wonder how I could tell how I managed to do all of this to young people, to students. It's hard to explain, and I'm not good at talking. I've always tried to improve, every time I achieved something I started thinking about how to make the next step. You need to have the courage to make decisions.""

"It seems to me to go back to those evenings in the tavern, my sisters talking about Candy Candy, me secretly listening to the family friends discussing the next deal. They were all convinced they were going to become billionaires, that luck was just around the corner, that a friend of a friend had found a sector where success was guaranteed."

"He simply moved forward: head down to produce and head up to look far ahead."

""I either become rich or I close," he tells a friend during those days."

"Italy is all about image, a post-subsistence economy where "the old object-use, cost-price relations appear either disrupted or strongly modified. "The fortune of designers and those who use their brand, their name for a variety of products, clothing, perfumes, lighters, glasses, telephones is that an ever-increasing number of Italians do not buy those items for normal use or just for that, but because they evoke sensations, pleasant stories, of beautiful models, elegance, easy money, jet set.""

""One day, Del Vecchio said: I'm coming back," so he tells on YouTube. "He told me that we could continue well together, I was convinced it was not possible. At that point, I was in excess.""

"If everything inside has remained unchanged, outside the Luxottica world has grown immensely. The house, a symbol of his definitive landing into the big bourgeoisie, is located right at the entrance of the mega-factory in Agordo, what in the company is called "the blue sea," from the color of the paint it was painted, a shade that over the years has become a sort of social color. Little marketing and a lot of substance even in that choice, explains to me the associate Luigi Francavilla, amused. "I liked blue because it was the color of the large factory where I worked in Switzerland before coming here." When the painter arrived, he had a can of paint in that shade. He swiped two brushstrokes. They watched him. Del Vecchio said, "It's fine." No soul searching or team meetings to choose the right shade to represent the values of the group. There was simply the need to paint the first shed."

"Lozza is a master craftsman, making continuous changes to the machinery that he himself has made to produce glasses thanks to the financing from Frescura, who invests all the profits from his business as a merchant in Padua into production. Another common trait with the future Mr. Luxottica: investing the profits in the company, in technology, machinery, and human capital."

""My lifelong dream has come true," he said to the shareholders on that day at the end of May."

""I have never thought that boarding school was a punishment," he tells me. "I have always been happy about those seven years that I lived. Putting a group of boys together is very educational. We were five hundred.""

"when he doesn't understand something, when a manager's ego is put before the interest of the company, when personal benefits are sought and one does not think of the good of the company, he becomes ruthless."

""I arrived in Agordo as a subcontractor, that is, as a supplier of parts to all the eyewear companies," he says. "I moved there. I loaded a truck with machines, I dismantled the workshop, I laid off those five or six employees I had, and I left." He is not even slightly aware that he is about to change the history of Italian industry. He is only thinking about improving his own economic and social condition, about developing the artisanal workshop, about building something of his own. He sets no limits for himself, nor immediate goals. He thinks about growing, that is enough, and that was exactly the opportunity he was looking for. Sure, you really have to want to go to Agordo, you don't end up there by accident."

"The impression is that of dealing with a top manager in full activity, not a patriarch at the end of his career who nostalgically remembers the heroic times of his great charge. In fact, he has no desire to talk about himself and his past. It will be one of the major difficulties in unraveling the tangle of his life: the reluctance to tell his story, to draw a line, to look back. He does not yet feel ready to take stock, he only wants to look forward."

"Luxottica, which thanks to its vertical integration creates natural entry barriers for anyone who wants to venture into the business of frames, where the margins are much higher compared to more mature industrial sectors and high capital intensity, such as automotive."

""Do you know what this thing Maradona did is called?" "Free kicks?" "No, it's called perseverance. I will never have it, and you must have it, Fabiè." PAOLO SORRENTINO, The Hand of God"

"Chemello describes the boom years with simplicity. One always worked, certainly, but the world was being conquered. When he went on holiday in August, camping to try out the new dinghy, he would bring a basket of phone tokens for any eventuality."

""We knew for a long time that this was the right solution, but only now have the conditions matured to make it possible," he explains."

"Luxottica then sells over 80 million frames around the world every year. That means almost 3 frames per second, 9,500 every hour, 230,000 every day, 7 million every month."

"He feels he is made of that stuff, the stuff of disruptors who transform the world with the power of their ideas."

"He has no roots that are difficult to detach from."

"At Johnson, Del Vecchio studies how to make molds for medals. He is the last arrival of eight workers, the young apprentice who can be asked anything. His colleagues send him to buy lunch every day. "But not for me," he recalls in an interview with Ferruccio de Bortoli in Corriere della Sera. "At that time I could not afford bread with mortadella and every morning my mother would prepare a 'schiscetta' with boiled cabbage: it was my lunch for years." The smell was unmistakable. There were no refrigerators, and the cabbage would ferment in the schiscetta until lunchtime."

"The world's largest lens manufacturer is tying the knot with the absolute leader in frames and eyewear sales."

"Andrea bases his era on three pillars: meticulous management control, an expansion policy with continuous acquisitions, and the communication of the group's strategy to investors and the market, a continuous storytelling to create a "transparent" and open company."

"His approach to the area of Belluno during those months happens gradually. It is said that, before setting up the factory in Agordo, he worked for a few months at the Metalflex headquarters in Venas, in Cadore. They had him do everything, from delivering parcels to customers at the post office to receiving sales and purchase documents. Months of apprenticeship that allowed the man from Milan to better understand the industry from inside one of the leading factories. He didn't miss the opportunity to learn from the best. Leonardo took note of everything: names, addresses, people. He studied every detail of the industrial activity, understood who the most promising customers were, which products were the most popular. Information that would prove useful a few years later, when he would set up his own business and compete directly with his former partners."

"Leonardo explains that he continues to work despite having become so rich because he still enjoys it, and because with his workers and executives he has created a real family and cannot leave them unless he is old."

""I am an entrepreneur who has always worked, ever since I was a boy. That's all," he starts off."

""Italy's Rich Uncle Scrooge downplays it. Better to be than to appear," captures the essence, says Corriere."

"He moved at the speed of light."

"He didn’t study, and for this he envies the great entrepreneurs. He reads newspapers, but when it comes to a book, "I can’t get past the third page. I get confused, I can’t follow the thread," he tells journalists."

"Ambition and fear are the engines of development, two continuous forces that feed each other: on one hand the need to always prove something more, on the other the concern that any unforeseen event can suddenly erase everything that has been built."

"Foreign wholesalers enter right away. The price attracts. It's as if you can see them, the elegant American importers studying the frames of this new company from Belluno with great attention. They are well made, to perfection. They place large orders. Outside the booth, a line of buyers forms. Del Vecchio and Francavilla exchange glances, a mutual understanding is enough. They started off apprehensive, with prices that were perhaps overly competitive. "All the wholesalers were literally diving into our small booth and leaving after placing significant orders." The price of a single piece went from 600 to 1,000 lire. But that still wasn't enough. "At one point, we increased the prices because we realized that they were probably too low, and so every hour the prices went up... it was chaos," explains the president. Francavilla is amused remembering their first Milanese expedition. "An incredible success. On the third day, we managed to triple the prices, up to 1,800 lire a piece.""

""The Italian has discovered the usefulness of the superfluous," writes Giorgio Bocca in Repubblica in 1987. "Mass snobbery creates new needs, new consumptions which the reporter would call superfluous but which marketing experts call emerging or proliferating.""

"There's only one office in the factory that is always empty, that of Leonardo. He's never at his desk. You can understand it even now, peering inside his ground floor room, that place is not lived in. It is tidy and clean, with old technological tools from the Eighties, a model of his first private airplane, a huge television turned off, a couple of framed photographs. It's clear at first glance that it's not a usual workplace. The office is not for him."

"Del Vecchio gets there by following his simple strategic rules. "It is important to set realistic goals and not to attack saturated markets," he explains. "If you choose the right product and you put your skills into it, then there is room for everyone. In the end, it's a matter of choices," he says when asked what his entrepreneurial formula is."

"Not him; he realizes that he is skilled, that the quality of his products is not easily matched by other manufacturers."

""Attention, concentration: if I relax, I collapse," the Bandabardò would sing."

"He is a father who is often absent and very strict."

"He is a father who is often absent and very strict."

"It may be because he too is a worker, at least in the early years, it may be because of that missing phalanx on a finger that doesn't let you forget for a moment where you started, it may be because his leadership clearly follows what management theories call "leading by example," guiding one's employees by setting an example, the fact remains that whoever enters the factory and asks to work tends to stay for life. And to give everything they have."

"The entrepreneur has multiplied the value of his initial investment more than four million times."

"At seven years old, during wartime, Leonardo leaves his family and ends up in an orphanage. An experience that will change him forever. "I grew up without a father and in an institution. Growing up without a family is something you can't explain unless you've lived it. It marks you," are the few words I manage to get out of him about those years."

""I follow the performance of our one thousand five hundred representatives every day. On the weekends, I really look at all the numbers," he explains simply. "I'm always in the company because I like it," he says, noting that he enters every office and factory without knocking."

""The future will come from a long silence," Pavese wrote."

"Studying his deeds, you understand that every strategy of his starts with the product: two auctions and a well-made setting, better than anyone else; you realize that his choices always head in one direction: excellence."

""After the apprenticeship was completed and this work had matured, I went to this factory and began to make molds.""

"We must be wary of Leonardo when he becomes too kind, the journalist notes, it means that he is closing up like a hedgehog, it's his way of keeping the whole world out."

"Guerra implements strategies that allow the company to avoid being overwhelmed by the tsunami caused by the credit crunch and the collapse in consumer spending. As he explains in several interventions, a company can die overnight because of its balance sheet, and not because of its income statement. What does that mean? Save the cash, make sure to have full bank accounts when the storm hits. He manages to do so and to bring the group from solid leader to the celebration of its fiftieth anniversary, in 2011."

"Italy discovers fashion, colors, brands. My sisters' glasses become colored, my father has photochromic lenses, my mother has large sunglasses. It's fashion, beauty. Milan its capital. The economic recovery inspires optimism, a second boom develops in areas that had remained on the fringes of the miracle of the Sixties, especially the Northeast."

"Alla fine la sua strategia è sempre stata una sola: «Io voglio essere il più bravo in tutto quello che faccio. Tutto qui». Ho terminato la prima bozza il 19 gennaio 2022 a Milano, nell’angolo più lontano della nostra camera. Fuori sta facendo buio, Matilde e Anna sono scese a giocare a pallavolo nel nostro intimo cortile condominiale. Rodolfo vuole parlare via WhatsApp con i mostri che lo svegliano di notte. È tutto il giorno che ascolto una canzone di Andrea von Kampen, che mi porta lontano, e fa così: «*Can you promise me a good, old fashioned holiday*». Mi ripropongo di rovinarla con una mia versione all’ukulele. Partono i titoli di coda, c’è Rino qua sotto che aspetta il Pisco Sour di Miguel, gli ho promesso che fa dimenticare gli incubi della quarantena. Scendo le scale mentre il poeta di Cortona fa partire il suo finale. «*La morte è quella cosa che agli altri può succedere*. *Ma resta sempre la speranza che a noi non accadrà. […]* *Amo gli inizi e ognuno ha i propri vizi,* *la primavera arriverà.*» Lorenzo Cherubini – *La primavera* La stesura finale è stata ultimata in un sabato di marzo in cui sembra di sentire fuori dalla tua finestra l’odore delle esplosioni di una guerra a cui non riesci a trovare un senso."

"It always happens when it's time to showcase the new sample books at the opticians' fairs: suddenly, Fifth Avenue becomes Pieve di Cadore and the hotels fill up with Italians on a business trip, friends, competitors, relatives, cousins, and even bitter rivals."

"Once again, Leonardo Del Vecchio chooses the path of independence, to which he adds a sense of responsibility towards the hundreds of people who depend on his decisions. "I feel a responsibility that you can't even imagine," he explains in the interview from 2000. "If one has many workers, he must start to consider the responsibility he has towards these families." Faced with such concerns, Leonardo decides to break the direct link that binds him to distribution. A disruptive choice in a market where the balance of power was respected and maintained by everyone. He simply doesn't care, he has a grit in his stomach that knows no limits, say some of his competitors from that period. Instead of looking for an agreement, he buys."

""Attention, concentration: if I relax, I collapse," the Bandabardò would sing."

"Simple, without much fuss. And if you ask Del Vecchio and the close-knit group of people who with him have created an industrial empire the secret of their success, you always find the same kind of answers. It all happened naturally, step by step, almost without realizing it, with the same humble approach as when they first climbed up here. "There's the one who has a passion for the mountains, the one who has a passion for cycling, mine has always been the factory, with the aim to industrialize, to improve.""

"A backpack on your shoulder, heavy shoes, rolled up socks, an open shirt, drenched in sweat. When you reach the cross, look towards the plain. If you are lucky, in the distance, you can glimpse the bell tower of San Marco. My grandmother always repeated to me: on clear days, from the Dolomitic peaks, you can see Venice, a precious reward for the effort of getting there. It has never happened to me."

"It is said that Leonardo is becoming more and more impatient, continuing to see his manager on the front pages of newspapers for reasons that have nothing to do with selling glasses."

"At the end of 2014, Luxottica recorded a net profit of over 640 million euros on a turnover of 7.652 billion, an absolute record despite changes at the top and attacks on the patron."

"He believes it is time to slow down, to hand over the operational tasks to someone young and skilled, who speaks languages and is willing to travel everywhere in his empire. He thinks it is now time to only deal with the strategic choices, the most important ones, with the goal of ensuring the company's security. He absolutely wants to avoid that in the future its survival could be jeopardized by potential internal conflicts among his children."

"Del Vecchio stops at fifth grade, completed by the lake. It is his great regret not being able to continue his studies. He learns the trade of engraving thanks to the vocational training courses, where he astonishes the teachers with his precision. At fourteen, he leaves the college, four years early, because he has already found a job. When he grows up, he wants to become "an excellent specialized mechanic," he writes in his resignation letter."

"It is said that in the 1970s, the three hours he spent in bed every night were often interrupted by sudden ideas, and for this reason, he kept a pocket recorder on his nightstand. If while sleeping he comes up with a solution to a problem or a way to expand production and business, as soon as he opens his eyes he jots it down and then goes back to sleep."

""When the workers came to work, they immediately grew fond of it. In this sense, I found a lot of willingness, a lot of attachment to the factory. Initially, they would enter with a certain wariness and with little interest, yet they managed to integrate quickly," he explains."

"With his black coat, he works and ensures that everything is in order and clean. Order is his obses"

""If he set his mind to something, he always got it," they tell me, pausing a moment before talking about all his conquests in the village."

"He has been in town for barely five years and is already a leading figure in the life of the small city, a volcano of ideas, one of those who never stop."

"He misses nothing, woe to try to hide any problem or underestimate it, because "the boss" – as they call him in code in Agordo, as always – will notice it at the first check."

""You know, I have only one true regret. I have always thought of work first. I never had a family. I never had a father. At seven years old, my mom took me to boarding school. And it was lucky, because the boarding school became my family. I was happy; they taught me the rules and gave me a job. And then the company became my family. Only now do I realize that by dedicating all of myself to the factory, to my collaborators – because I really care, I have respect for work and for people – I spent little time with my children. That's my only worry," he had told me a year before."

"It is the dream he has cherished for years. To complete his design he needs to become a leader in the corrective lens segment as well, where he finds high margins but also significant entry barriers: patents, exclusivity, advanced machinery, and a lot of specific technology. The best way to enter is to associate with one of the reference groups. For this reason, he has studied the major manufacturers for years and has already tried various approaches, without being able to conclude any agreement, however."