MILLIONAIRE'S FALL

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 1, Issue 108, 29 December 1931, Page 7

MILLIONAIRE'S FALL

ITALIAN MAGNATE NOW POLITICAL PR1SONER ON ISLAND PHILOSOPHY {IN ADVERSITY Signor Riecardo Gualino, ex-mil-lionaire, eontroller of 80,000 worlcers, founder of powerful companies and a Maecenas of the arts, is now a political prisoner on Lipari, and to while away the time studies the lives of the Great Fathers of the Church, St. Paul, St. Augustine and St. Jerome, and writes down "fragments from my life." Some quotations from these memoirs, which Mondadori is publishing, are given in a Turin newspaper this weelc by a correspondent who seems to have been more favourably impressed by the natural beauties of Lipari than by the personality of Signor Gualino, says a writer in an exchange. Signor Gualino caine of fairly well-to-do parents living in Piedmont. For a few years .after he left his father's house he was content to work feverishly and live frugally on nuts and an apple, with a crust of bread. But everything he touched flourished, and people were fascinated by the originality of his adventurous, cohrageous spirit. At the age of 25 he was already a wellknown figure in the industrial world, and could have bought up the whole of his family several times over. Money alone did not satisfy him. Business undertakings in Russia filled him with visions of Peter the Great. He writes: "Few achievements appeared to me more marvellously attractive than to create a city; within the space of a few years to raise out of the wilderness streets pulsing with life, dazzling with light, and full of modern palaces built on the most modern plans; in short, to create life where silence had been-." Instead of cities he built dockyards on the Mississippi for the construction of merchant ships, and f ounded the Snia, or Italo-American Navigation Company. Later came the foundation of the artificial silk company, and a new combination arose ealled the Snia-Viscosa, a name made unpleasantly familiar by the Oustric case. He only speaks vaguely of the causes of his downfall: "An unknown power suddenly undermined the foundations of my position and brought me sad days." The man who lived in a yortex of affairs, loved art passionately, and who had always felt the ground to be solid under his feet now sits philosophising on a small island in the Sicilian Sea. He says: "By good fortune one develops in long enf orced silence: thoughts ripen in solitude and Nse towards new, far-off, dim horizons. Yet, should I be ealled •shortly to the' kingdom of death, I shall go gladly, because I have, lived and I have created."