Ferruccio Lamborghini

Ferruccio Lamborghini was born on 28 April 1916 to viticulturists Antonio and Evelina Lamborghini in house number 22 in Renazzo di Cento, in the Province of Ferrara, in the Emilia-Romagna region of Northern Italy. According to his baptismal certificate, Ferruccio was baptised as a Roman Catholic four days later, on 2 May.

As a young man, Lamborghini was drawn more to farming machinery rather than the farming lifestyle itself. Following his interest in mechanics, Lamborghini studied at the Fratelli Taddia technical institute near Bologna. In 1940 he was drafted into the Italian Royal Air Force, where he served as a mechanic at the Italian garrison on the island of Rhodes, a territory of the Kingdom of Italy since 1911, after the Italo-Turkish War, becoming the supervisor of the vehicle maintenance unit. He found the opportunity to experiment with his mechanical skills as a repair technician at the 50th mixed motor unit (a military base in Rhodes in the Italian Dodecanese).

In July 1943, Italy deposed Mussolini, and in early September negotiated the Armistice of Cassibile with the Allies, which triggered the German Operation Achse to disarm the Italian forces before they once again could fight against their former allies Austria and Germany, like they had done in 1915. In the Battle of Rhodes, most Italian soldiers either fled or were among the 30,000 Italians captured as prisoners of war. Lamborghini initially escaped capture but later returned to his former workplace in civilian clothes, working several odd jobs, and with the permission of the German forces opened a small vehicle workshop.

When the island fell to the British at the end of the war in 1945 he was arrested as a collaborator, and was not able to return home to Italy until the following year. In 1946, he married Clelia Monti (a native of Ferrara whom he had met in Rhodes during the war) in the church of Santa Maria in Vado in Ferrara. On October 13, 1947, their son Tonino was born, but Clelia died giving birth. In 1948, Lamborghini met Annita Borgatti, a 24-year-old teacher and daughter of the owners of the Fontana Hotel in Cento, who would accompany him in running his businesses for over thirty years.

Lamborghini's passion for engines and machines led him to work in a company that overhauled military vehicles. In 1946, the growing demand for tractors in the Italian market, combined with the experience gained in repairs, pushed Lamborghini to pursue a career as an entrepreneur in the production of tractors. He bought surplus military vehicles from the war and transformed them into agricultural machines.

Beginnings of entrepreneurship

In 1947 Ferruccio Lamborghini recognized an emerging market in post-War Italy devoted to agricultural and industrial revitalization. Using parts from military vehicle engines and differentials from ARAR centres, Lamborghini built the first of his "Carioca" tractors, themselves based on the six-cylinder petrol engines of Morris trucks.

As petrol in Italy was prohibitively priced, Lamborghini augmented the Morris engines with a fuel atomiser of his own creation, which allowed the tractors to be started with petrol, then switch to the cheaper diesel fuel. Based on the initial success of the Carioca, Lamborghini founded Lamborghini Trattori and began manufacturing tractors.