The larger-than-life saga of Italy’s Agnelli family, the billionaires behind automaker Fiat, is set to be realistically reconstructed in a high-end international TV series that will recount the dynastic tale from a female point of view.
The still-untitled Agnelli skein was announced Saturday by director and producer Ginevra Elkann, who is the granddaughter of late Fiat magnate Gianni Agnelli. Gianni Agnelli is being remembered in Italy this weekend on the centennial of his birth. Elkann made the announcement on Saturday speaking on Mediaset talk show “Verissimo.”
Lorenzo Mieli’s The Apartment Pictures, the expanding Fremantle-owned unit known for “The Young Pope,” “My Brilliant Friend” and “We Are Who We Are,” has teamed up with Elkann’s Asmara Film and Virginia Valsecchi’s Capri Entertainment on the Agnelli project.
The Agnelli TV series producers are recruiting a writing team comprising anglo-saxon scribes, according to a source close to the project. They will delve into the narrative using the Agnelli family women as guiding lights; an original twist on a clan considered akin to royalty in Italy where its male members have always been the ones in the spotlight.
Not that the Agnelli family lacks strong female characters.
Gianni Agnelli’s mother Virginia was a protofeminist, who after the premature death of her first husband, Edoardo Agnelli, in 1935 sought to remarry, this time with eccentric Italian writer Curzio Malaparte, who had fallen out of favour with Mussolini. A bitter spat followed between Virginia and her father-in-law, Giovanni Agnelli, who tried to have parental custody of her seven children taken away from her.
The Agnelli family saga, which has never been brought to the screen before in a fictional retelling, is rich with history, family lawsuits, jet-setting, hidden assets, princes and princesses, palaces and yachts, spectacular weddings and stately funerals.
The family, which now holds a significant stake in Stellantis, the company recently formed by the merger of Fiat Chrysler with PSA Group, also controls sportscar maker Ferrari, the Juventus Football Club and a stake in French shoe and bag maker Christian Louboutin, among other assets.
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