OUT OF TIME

Out of time is Paolo Cassano, a visionary and dynamic entrepreneur from Gioia del Colle in the province of Bari. At the beginning of the XXth century he succeeded in developing an economically winning enterprise, imposing the FIDE Cognac, produced in Puglia and of the highest oenological quality, on the market. Entrepreneurial success did not prevent him at the same time from looking after his workers and their families, providing for their homes, social services, literacy and scholastic instruction of their children out of the expenses of the company, providing high wages and promoting their trade unionism. History did not favour him. Both the low cultural level of the other local and Italian entrepreneurs and unitary politics that for the South meant subordination, even for the most active entrepreneurs, to the interests of the North, made his dream fade away after the peaks of success. An event that worked out between the Unity of Italy and the rise of Fascism, leaving one thinking that all that later took place might not have been inevitable.