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John Elkann, the young grandson of Giovanni Agnelli (founder of Fiat) who assumed last week the chairmanship of IFIL (the investment firm that controls Fiat), is profiled in the Face Value feature of the Economist in its May 10th edition. He is not the typical Italian: "Born in New York, he spent his childhood in America, France and Brazil." The profile made me smile because of the following sentences: "Mr Elkann is a graduate in industrial engineering, having chosen that subject, he says, because it was more challenging that economics or business, the usual choices of youngsters preparing to take over the family firm. In Italy, where avvocati [lawyers] and dottori [physicians] are thick on the ground, the title of ingegnere [engineer] has greater prestige." Rightly so!