Fully one-quarter of Italy's exports come from companies with only 11 to 100 employees. And while the few big names of Italian industry have occasionally been shaken by crises, as Olivetti is now, Signor Brambilla has gone quietly on enriching himself and his country. His family company, founded by his grandfather, makes various types of cylinders, and employs 70 people in Varese, north of Milan. Add innate individual enterprise and the sort of technical ingenuity that enables an Italian mechanic to improvise a car repair without the right spare part, and it makes a yeasty mix. Across the board, Italian companies are smaller than their counterparts in the rest of Europe.
Similar ratios apply to textile and footwear companies and to other manufacturers.
For this reason, Italy is sometimes said to resemble Japan, but Japanese small companies do cluster around big companies to a greater extent than is the case in Italy. Although many small Italian companies play a subcontractor role, many more turn out finished products. Taiwan may therefore offer a closer parallel. Italy's smaller manufacturing companies are not spread evenly over the peninsula. There are some hopeful signs of new entrepreneurial activity in the south, notably in the Marche for shoes and in Puglia for furniture, but the bulk of such companies are located in the northern provinces of Piedmont, Lombardy, the Veneto, Friuli and Trentino, which make up Italy's industrial heartland.