Montezemolo had been a successful rally driver for the Lancia team, before he went to studying for a masters in commercial law at Columbia University, when he was lured by Enzo Ferrari to reorganize the Ferrari racing department, which then became an outstanding success. After 1977, the Agnellis dispatched him to various outposts of their empire: their press holdings, which include the newspaper La Stampa; the aperitif Cinzano; and, with Cinzano as its main sponsor, Italy's first America's Cup yachting contender, the Azzurra, in 1983. Montezemolo next organized Italy's successful hosting of the soccer World Cup in 1990. A year later, Agnelli gave Montezemolo his sporting jewel, the Turin-based Juventus soccer club, to manage. From there, Agnelli dropped him straight into the cockpit of the bloated sputtering Ferrari Co. Montezemolo served a regency as Fiat chairman from 2004 to 2010.

Wall Street Magazine; By Joshua Levine;  September 29, 2011 

"Why does he want to speak to me?" asked Luca Cordero di Montezemolo last May. The chairman of Ferrari seemed puzzled that Paolo Nespoli, the lone Italian astronaut on the International Space Station, had asked to use his one phone call from orbit to speak to Montezemolo. The question seems a bit disingenuous. If you spend even a few hours with him, it starts to feel like everybody in Italy wants to talk to Montezemolo.

Many of them do. Passersby stop him in the streets of Bologna, where Montezemolo lives during the week. They ask to have their picture taken with him next to Ferrari's new hatchback, the FF. Montezemolo almost always obliges. Unusually for one of Italy's most successful businessmen, he moves around without bodyguards. This is his idea of fun. "How do you like the new car?? bella, no?" he asks anybody within range, pretty much the way you would if you were taking your new $300,000 12-cylinder 660-horsepower station wagon for a spin around the neighborhood.

Montezemolo, 64, doesn't have to fish too hard for compliments. When he rejoined Ferrari in 1991, several years after the death of legendary founder Enzo Ferrari, the company was floundering: deeply in debt with spotty sales and even spottier quality. "All the cars had engines in the back, and were very difficult to get into and out of?very uncomfortable and a bit old-fashioned," Montezemolo recalls.

Today, Ferrari sells around 7,000 cars a year and could undoubtedly sell a lot more if Montezemolo wanted it to. Sales dipped during the 2008 financial crisis, but Ferrari has never had a money-losing quarter. Last year, sales rose 8 percent to $1.9 billion euros (US$2.76 billion at current exchange rates) while profits rose 27 percent to $302.7 million euros (US$439 million).

Montezemolo also retooled Ferrari's legendary Formula 1 automobile-racing team, whose glory days appeared behind it. When he arrived for his second stint at Ferrari, the team hadn't won a championship for 12 years. Starting in 1999, Ferrari won 14 titles?eight constructor's championships for best team and six driving championships.

This alone gives Montezemolo a godlike aura in Italy. "He's been one of the giants of F1 for many years," says Martin Whitmarsh, who runs the McLaren racing team, one of Ferrari's bitterest rivals. "He's got a passion that his competitors can feel, and sometimes it can even be uncomfortable to be around." What's more, Ferrari's team is even said to make a little money despite having by far the sport's biggest budget?some $415 million last year, according to Formula Money, an annual industry report. This in itself is astonishing in the financial sinkhole of Formula 1 racing.

The video link to the space station is established at Ferrari's Maranello headquarters and the grainy astronaut appears on the screen wearing a cardinal-red shirt?Ferrari's color?with the Italian flag sewn onto it. "Thank you for wearing that shirt and the flag," says Montezemolo, adding, "The only thing missing up there is the Cavallino." The Cavallino Rampante is Ferrari's logo, a rearing stallion on a yellow background. The astronaut floats over to another part of the cabin and points to a big metal box. A bright yellow Cavallino is stuck to the side. "You make me proud to be an Italian," says Montezemolo solemnly. "No, you make me proud to be an Italian," says Nespoli with equal solemnity. They sign off, but not before Montezemolo invites the entire crew of the space station to visit him in Maranello when they return to earth.

It is not easy to resist the full-on charm of Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, Marchese di Montezemolo (which makes him a marquis, a title he doesn't use). With his wavy but not too-long hair, aquiline nose, understated double-breasted gray suit and razor-edged pocket square, Montezemolo represents an impeccable Italy in distinct contrast to its opera buffa prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, whom a lot of Italians would like Montezemolo to replace.

A recent poll by the opinion research firm SWG found that 60 percent of Italians think it would be good for Italy if Montezemolo were to go into politics. In 2009, Montezemolo founded Italia Futura, a nonpartisan political brain trust modeled along the lines of the Brookings Institution or the Heritage Foundation. Italia Futura is not exactly a political party, says Andrea Romano, the University of Rome Tor Vergata history professor who runs it, but is a political "brand" associated with Montezemolo. The hallmarks of the brand are managerial competence and a call to dismantle Italy's deadweight political structure and reboot its flagging entrepreneurial drive. Some of this was also what Berlusconi called for when he first came on the scene, but he got a little sidetracked. "Montezemolo is affidabile," says Romano?reliable, trustworthy. "You know he's not going to get caught in a bunga-bunga."

Lately, Montezemolo has been making some restrained but still pointed political noises. With Italy in a financial shambles and struggling to raise cash, he has said publicly that he should be paying more in taxes, as should other very wealthy Italians. "I'm rich, and I'm ready to pay more taxes," he told the Rome daily La Repubblica. The paper put his annual income at around 5 million euros. "In return, I call upon the state to reduce the scope of its activities and to operate more efficiently. Concerning my proposal for a tax on annual incomes of between 5 and 10 million euros a year, I heard a deafening silence." La Repubblica heard the distant ring of a political pledge.

Will he run? It's a question Montezemolo is adroit at dodging while letting it hang provocatively in the air. "I don't want to tell you any lies, because in five or six months you can come back and say, 'Why did you lie to me?' but at the moment I'm very happy and busy with Ferrari," he says.

Paolo Borgomanero has been friends with Montezemolo for 20 years and knows him well. They both loved Acqua di Parma cologne and bonded over their shared distress that it had become impossible to find. So in 1992 they bought the company together for "a few million lire," says Borgomanero. They sold it to LVMH in 2003 for 20 million euros. "He loves it when people tell him, 'Oh presidente, please do something for the country,' " says Borgomanero. "If he were sure that all the people love him, he would do it?no problem. If only some of the people love him, it's a problem. He hates enemies?enemies who kick him in the dark." It's safe to say that the moment Montezemolo throws his pocket square into the ring, the kicking will begin.

The Montezemolo story everyone from astronauts to waiters adores could have come straight from the studios of Cinecitt?, whose classic films showed the world the hearty pleasures of Italian life. Montezemolo particularly admired the way his mentor Gianni Agnelli, the ultimate cosmopolitan, never lost his "almost provincial passion" for the things every Italian enjoys. Montezemolo is very much the same way.

A friend remembers him arriving at a seaside pasta joint sweaty from a long bicycle ride. The proprietor was taken aback. "What a coincidence," she said. "You say your name is Luca, and you look exactly like Luca Cordero di Montezemolo." Though he owns a yacht, he prefers zipping around the coves below his house on Capri in a fast runabout. He's got two donkeys at his house in Bologna, and keeps their pictures on his iPhone, next to photos of the roses in his garden. "I love donkeys!" he gushes.

Family and friends are everywhere. He lives in Rome with his second wife, Ludovica Andreoni, their two daughters, Guia, 11, and Maria, 8, and son, Lupo, 1. His son from his first marriage, Matteo, 33, left Goldman Sachs in London and now manages the family investment vehicle, Montezemolo & Partners, which has a controlling stake in the 180-million-euro Charme private-equity fund. The fund bought the fancy leather furniture maker Poltrona Frau from an old friend of Montezemolo's whose two daughters didn't want to run it ("I said, 'Listen, why don't you sell me the majority?' He says no, no, yes, so I bought it" is how Montezemolo recalls the transaction). Charme also owns three other sexy furniture makers, Cassina, Cappellini and Thonet, and Ballantyne Scottish cashmere sweaters.

From the outside, it looks like the chummiest kind of capitalism, where a bunch of pals buys a bunch of things they really like. It helps that Montezemolo's friends are named Diego Della Valle, the founder of Tod's, and Seragnoli, one of Italy's great industrial families. Their most ambitious investment is a company called NTV. It will be Europe's first private high-speed rail line, called the Italo, when it begins its first runs between Milan and Rome next year. Montezemolo puts the price of the investment so far at 1 billion euros. He is its chairman, and he, Della Valle and a third friend, businessman Gianni Punzo, own 33.5 percent of it.

Montezemolo and Della Valle talk all the time, often for no reason at all. I'm sitting in a restaurant with Montezemolo when he suddenly calls Della Valle out of the blue. "I'm sitting here with a journalist. He hates your shoes," he announces, before passing me the phone. I ask Della Valle whether Montezemolo always busts his chops this way. "You should see how he gets after a few glasses of wine," says Della Valle. "We were just two young guys in Rome 25 years ago, dreaming about what we would do on a Saturday afternoon. We have the same feeling about the Italian style of life, and he helped me start Tod's. He's got a human touch, but still very sophisticated."

The first reel of the Montezemolo movie starts when he returns briefly to Italy while studying for a masters in commercial law at Columbia University. He has been a successful rally driver for the Lancia team, but now it's time to get serious. Montezemolo comes from old Piedmontese aristocracy and his family tree is heavy with generals, cardinals and surgeons. A popular radio talk show called "Chiamate Roma 3131"?call Rome 3131?invites the dashing rally driver as its guest. One of the callers starts baiting him.

"He said I never would have amounted to anything if I didn't come from money, that car racing was a rich kid's sport and too dangerous and blah blah blah," recalls Montezemolo. "I was very frank. I said, 'You're talking a lot of bulls?!' Enzo Ferrari was listening to the show in his office. So he called 3131 and asked, 'Who is that tough young kid with the balls to answer that idiot?' This was in December 1972, and he told me he needed someone like me to reorganize the Ferrari racing department. I said, 'You don't have to ask me twice.' " Montezemolo was 26 years old and his family was not pleased. "They said, 'Listen, you've been to the States to become an international lawyer, and here you are playing with cars again!' "

In 1973, the Ferrari team performed miserably. Montezemolo recalls the pain of his first postrace phone call to Enzo Ferrari to tell him of Ferrari's 19th-place finish. Those phone calls took on a different tenor after Montezemolo selected a little-known Austrian driver named Niki Lauda to pilot Ferrari. It was the first time that Montezemolo displayed his knack for picking talent, which has been a critical element of his success. Lauda won the championship for Ferrari in 1975 and again in 1977. "He took a job that everybody thought would be impossible," recalls John Hogan, a veteran of several F1 teams and sponsors who now works for F1 consultants Just Marketing International. "His fingerprints were everywhere on that team; you could see he was going to be a power broker."

What Montezemolo doesn't mention when he tells the story is that he wasn't exactly a dark horse when he came to Ferrari. One of his closest school chums at the Massimiliano Massimo high school in Rome was Cristiano Rattazzi, the son of Susanna Agnelli and a nephew of Gianni and Umberto Agnelli, who owned and ran Fiat (Mario Draghi, just named to run the European Central Bank, was another schoolmate). The Agnellis helped Enzo Ferrari out of a jam in 1969 by buying 50 percent of it (Fiat's stake is 90 percent today).

L'Avvocato, as everyone called Gianni Agnelli, took an instant liking to the funny, self-possessed teenager. "He was the most important person in my life outside my family," says Montezemolo of the man who became like a second father to him. It didn't hurt that Montezemolo could navigate smoothly among the spiky Agnelli clan. That relationship has been the keystone of his career, and he has rarely strayed from under the family's wide industrial dome since.

After 1977, the Agnellis dispatched him to various outposts of their empire: their press holdings, which include the newspaper La Stampa; the aperitif Cinzano; and, with Cinzano as its main sponsor, Italy's first America's Cup yachting contender, the Azzurra, in 1983. The experience was mixed, but it confirmed that Montezemolo sure knew how to put on a good show (it's a quality his critics have turned on its head to portray him as more Barnum than businessman). The boat came in third, but the event so caught Italy's imagination that a bumper crop of little Italian girls was born soon after with the name Azzurra. Montezemolo next organized Italy's successful hosting of the soccer World Cup in 1990. A year later, Agnelli gave Montezemolo his sporting jewel, the Turin-based Juventus soccer club, to manage, bypassing and painfully wounding his son Edoardo. Montezemolo bailed out after a disastrous year of backbiting and failure that remains a low point of his career. "I wouldn't wish a year like that on anyone," he said later.

From there, Agnelli dropped him straight into the cockpit of the sputtering Ferrari. Enzo Ferrari had been dead three years when Montezemolo arrived. The company was bloated, its cars were boring, and its racing team was a mess. "Before Luca arrived, the cars were less like Ferraris and more like Fiats," recalls Antonello Perricone, another Fiat veteran who has known Montezemolo since they summered together in Cortina as boys. "Luca completely changed the company's DNA."

A good way to appreciate Montezemolo's imprint on Ferrari is to walk around the factory at Maranello. In the past decade, he has commissioned celebrated architects like Jean Nouvel, Renzo Piano and Massimiliano Fuksas, among others, to design the buildings that make up the Ferrari factory complex. Graceful steel and glass palazzi channel sunlight into the high-tech workstations; inside, oases of trees freshen the air on the factory floor.

We climb the stairs to Marco Visconti's Ferrari canteen, shaped like a giant helicopter blade. The walls are hung with large landscape photos, but no Ferraris. "These guys build cars all day," explains Montezemolo. "The last thing they need to look at when they eat lunch is more cars." We stop briefly in the main cafeteria, where Montezemolo insists I try a slice of the anchovy pizza before entering his private dining room for vitello tonnato and gnocchi. Montezemolo loves to eat, and the food is really very good.

Downstairs after lunch, clumps of crimson-clad Ferrari workers are talking and smoking on benches underneath Visconti's airy arcade. "Ciao, ragazzi! Come va?" Montezemolo hails one little group after another in his down-to-earth Medici manner. I mention to Montezemolo that his friend Emilio Bot?n of Banco Santander?the Ferrari team's second-biggest sponsor?built almost no outdoor benches at Santander's austere campus outside Madrid; he wanted his employees standing while they smoked, the quicker to get them back to work. Montezemolo takes a different view. "I gave the architect clear instructions: Do whatever you want, but I want an Italian piazza where after lunch you can have a coffee, you can sit, you can smoke a cigarette." In 2007, the Financial Times voted Maranello the best place to work in Europe.

Montezemolo's deepest imprint, however, is on the cars themselves. He is very much of the "car-she-is-like-a-woman" school of automotive poetry, embellishing the old metaphor with loving detail (the first date is when you turn the key in the ignition). When he received an honorary degree in industrial design from Milan's Politecnico, he delivered a discourse on the difference between "hot" and "cold" technology. Basically, Porsche: cold; Ferrari: hot. "There's an old Paolo Conte song where he sings, 'A sports car must smell of girls, paint and speed.' That's our mentality," says his friend Borgomanero.

You can smell all three as you walk down the Ferrari assembly line. A machine that freezes valve-seat inserts and heats nuts so the two fuse forever when, after insertion, they return to normal temperature is nicknamed Romeo and Juliet. At the end of the line, just before the finished car comes off, is a woman ostensibly employed to make love to it: She caresses the leather, smells the interior, palpates the dashboard and otherwise engages in a kind of industrial heavy petting. She is doing what you would do when you first get the car home. If it's good for her, it will be good for you.

At the end of the day Montezemolo and I climb into Ferrari's new FF hatchback for the 40-minute ride back to Bologna. Car critics have raved about the way the FF has managed to add family-style comfort to what remains a four-wheeled missile (zero to 60 mph: 3.7 seconds) without compromising either. The FF's newfangled all-wheel drive, in particular, gets gearheads drooling over the way it automatically disengages as the car moves into higher gear. "They're totally thinking outside the box," says veteran automotive writer Matt Davis, who rapturously reviewed the FF for Autoblog.com. "The all-wheel drive is total genius."

Still, Montezemolo wants to check out a few minor details for himself, which is why Dario Benuzzi, Ferrari's chief test driver for 40 years, gets in the back seat. "Dario?do you hear? There's a very small noise, like Eeee, when we hit a certain speed," says Montezemolo. Benuzzi hears nothing and looks slightly nervous. "Don't worry?the car is wonderful, but . . . there it is again. Eeeee."

After tearing through the back roads around Maranello, Montezemolo hits the highway, where he opens the car up to 240 kilometers (150 miles) per hour. There's an old Jackie Mason comedy routine where a man calls his wife from a car on his portable phone to say, "I'm in the car!" Montezemolo now takes out his portable and performs an insane Italian rendition of the same routine as we rocket down the highway: "I'm in the car!" But the really scary part is when his other hand shoots up reflexively as he pronounces one of his favorite words: "Fantastico!"

The word passion comes up with just about everybody who knows Montezemolo, although the word is sometimes a euphemism for his explosive temper. "Usually, industrialists are cold and sharp," says Borgomanero. "That's not Luca. When he's happy, you know about it, and when he's unhappy, you know about it."

Montezemolo's sometimes unruly passion spills out most volubly with his racing team. He understood that Ferrari's commercial fortunes were tied to its racing mystique and its continued success on the track. He backed up that conviction by engaging driver Michael Schumacher to pilot the lead car at an astronomical salary of around $40 million a year. Schumacher proceeded to reel off five driving championships in a row between 2000 and 2004. The titles not only burnish the brand, they also support a merchandising empire that has grown to more than 40 stores globally and one very red theme park in Abu Dhabi, where it stands at the center of a $40 billion development. At the Ferrari store in Maranello, for instance, you can spend $30 on a Ferrari baby bib that says "Wroom!" or $5,500 for the crankshaft from its 2003 F1 racing car. Ferrari says this kind of thing adds around 40 million euros to its bottom line?between 15 and 20 percent of Ferrari's total operating profit.

But for all his enthusiasm, you will never see Montezemolo in the Ferrari paddock on race day, or even in the stands. "I must watch the race on television in a room, alone," says Montezemolo. "I don't want anybody there?I'm too nervous." In Abu Dhabi last year, Ferrari lost the championship in the final seconds of the race, largely due to avoidable mistakes. Montezemolo threw a chair through the television.

He always takes losing hard, but he took that defeat very hard. "I didn't hear from him for two weeks after that," says his close friend Perricone. "His reaction to the errors was molto cattivo?really nasty." Soon after the loss, however, Montezemolo assembled the team and thanked them one by one. "Bravo?I'm proud of you," he told them all. Says Perricone, "The team mentality is the most important part of Ferrari to him?all of these guys are there for many years. On a team, the most important place is in the dressing room, and in the dressing room, Montezemolo is at his best."

Montezemolo's hot-blooded style stands in direct contrast to Sergio Marchionne, the no-nonsense Canadian-Italian who was brought in as Fiat president while Montezemolo was serving a regency as Fiat chairman from 2004 to 2010. The Agnelli family called upon Montezemolo to step in following the deaths of Gianni and Umberto Agnelli. The current Fiat chairman, John Elkann, son of Gianni Agnelli's daughter Margherita, was felt to need more seasoning. Montezemolo's stint at Fiat owed more to family fealty than personal ambition, and it is the sweater-wearing Marchionne who gets the credit for turning Fiat around. Marchionne will also play a big role in Ferrari's future as he marshals Fiat's various assets to push its stake in Chrysler to over half from the 30 percent it owns now. Marchionne is convinced that car companies must have massive scale to survive, and he is not known for his sentimentality.

Montezemolo already anticipates boosting Ferrari's annual production to 10,000 cars within the next five to 10 years, but only because he's moving aggressively into China and India, he says, not because Fiat demands more cash. "I have a very good relationship with Marchionne, and our view about the future of Ferrari is exactly the same?to maintain exclusivity, increase the numbers in new markets and not sell too many cars in the United States or Europe," says Montezemolo.

The rumor that surfaces repeatedly has Fiat raising cash by selling some or all of Ferrari to the public. How much could Fiat get? Most analysts put a value of around 3 billion euros on Ferrari, which Montezemolo calls laughably low. Ferrari is known for being infuriatingly opaque, however. It rarely discloses more than the most rudimentary information about its finances and asks outsiders to treat it more like an elusive dream than a going concern.

"I have no idea where their money comes from," says Erich Hauser, an analyst at Credit Suisse. "There is an element to the business that clearly has nothing to do with building cars, but when you ask, they say 'We can't tell you.' " Hauser suspects that Ferrari will sell off a small piece of itself in a market like Hong Kong, where luxury brands can command higher valuations. That's what Prada recently did, getting a dizzying multiple of five times sales. Says Hauser, "I think Prada is a good role model for what Ferrari wants to do." Montezemolo says there's no IPO in the works, but he doesn't dispute Hauser's basic premise. "If you look at the numbers, we're much closer to a luxury-goods company than a car business, and that's important."

A successful IPO would be a good note for Montezemolo to go out on, if going out is what he's planning to do. His son Matteo says the family hopes he doesn't go into politics, but wonders whether his father will succumb to his strong need to please people. You can feel that need tug at him almost physically sometimes. At a restaurant in Bologna, a waiter approaches Montezemolo during dinner. A TV in the background is showing municipal election results, and prime minister Silvio Berlusconi's candidate for mayor of Milan is getting killed in what is seen as a direct referendum on Berlusconi's popularity. "Signore, I am ready," the waiter announces. "For what?" laughs Montezemolo. "For anything!" he answers as two other waiters join him, nodding fiercely. "Well, that's three votes, anyway," says Montezemolo, clearly pleased. "You have to start somewhere."

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