Solomeo is a village in Umbria, settled more than 500 years before Captain Cook courted the reticent Gweagal people in what would come to be called Botany Bay. (Spears hurled at the English during this first encounter are still on display at Cambridge University, despite requests for their return.) While Cook wondered in his journal whether the ‘very dark or black’ colour of the men he saw from a distance ‘was the real colour of their skins or the C[l]othes they might have on’, on the other side of the world the small population of Solomeo was making a living in the same manner they had for centuries: via wheat, grape and textile production.

Perhaps change occurs at a more leisurely pace in Italy. Within eighteen months of white settlement of Australia, an estimated two thirds of the surrounding indigenous population would be dead from small pox.  By the mid 19th century, the population of Solomeo had ambled upwards to hit 400. At the time of the last census in 2001, the hilltop village in “the green heart of Italy” still had just 436 inhabitants. Yet, even here, change has occurred. Many of the villagers now work for Brunello Cucinelli, a 56 year old fashion designer who was named Italy’s 2009 Entrepreneur of the Year by US auditing firm Ernst and Young.

Cucinelli recently travelled to Monte Carlo to compete against other lauded entrepreneurs, including Australia’s 2009 Entrepreneur of the Year, Greg Roebuck, for the title of Ernst & Young World Entrepreneur of the Year 2010. (Both Cucinelli and Roebuck were pipped at the post by Michael Spencer, Group CEO of the UK’s ICAP plc.)

Roebuck is the chief executive of Carsales.com.au, a car classifieds website recently floated for $800 million. The judges of the Australian leg of the competition admired the “absolute flair” with which Roebuck “executed his business model”. They were also quite taken with the profits carsales.com has generated.

Based on the comments of the Italian judges, Cucinelli, who is also turning a steady profit, might well have been nominated for an entirely different award. He was praised for “his steady examination of the psychological well-being and quality of life in the workplace, for his passion in the recovery and restoration of historic buildings and his commitment in promoting education and culture.”

Cucinelli’s mother was born in Solomeo and his father is an uneducated farmer who once tilled the fertile plains below. Cucinelli is, in other words, a peasant boy made good. He founded his eponymous fashion label at the age of 25, after dropping out of an engineering degree to feed his appetite for knowledge and experience in a cafe frequented by prostitutes, professors and priests.

Cucinelli’s first forays into the fashion business involved ripping off the brightly dyed sweaters Benetton had been producing since the 1960s (although Cucinelli’s were made from cashmere rather than wool). Today he employs 470 people to produce, distribute and sell his range of luxury “sportswear” and accessories that, according to Rebecca Mead of The New Yorker, are unsuitable “for doing anything more physically taxing than shopping or lunching” and are “more likely to be in subtle shades of goat” than the jewel-like hues of yesteryear.

Twenty-nine years after it was started, the brand “Brunello Cucinelli” is a darling of Saks Fifth Avenue and has an annual turnover of more than $200 million US. But success in business has not diminished the curiosity, passion or eccentricity implicit in Cucinelli’s choice of a “sentimental education” over a formal one.

Cucinelli has converted the village’s dilapidated castle into a picturesque factory and its Renaissance villa into a dining hall for his employees. (Apparently tourists frequently mistake this workplace cafeteria for an up-market restaurant, a mistake unlikely to be made anywhere I’ve ever worked.) He has also contributed to the restoration of Solomeo’s twelfth century church (which was allowed, unlike the villa and the castle, to retain its intended function), repaved the village’s streets and restored its piazzas.

He has not, moreover, contented himself with restoration, building from scratch a woodland park, installing a library which employees are encouraged to frequent (stocked mostly with great male writers such as Dante, Kafka, Proust, Nietzsche and Derrida) and, in his most ambitious project, constructing a 240 seat, 16th century-style theatre, in which travelling theatre companies perform monthly plays for the entertainment and edification of the villagers.

Most likely, however, it is not these grand architectural and cultural gestures that have won Cucinelli the loyalty of his employees. Mead spoke to a seamstress who’d been with Cucinelli for the last seven years of a 40 year career in the industry.

“It is better than any other experience I have had,” the seamstress told Mead. “We’re treated like humans, and in other places we were treated more like machines. We get respect for what we do with our hands. It doesn’t seem like a lot, but we appreciate it.”

Respect, in Cucinelli’s village, is not about platitudes. Conscious that the process of making clothes is tedious and repetitive, he has instituted a company-wide 90 minute lunch break, which allows employees to go home and feed their families if they so choose. They also have the option of eating in the aforementioned cafeteria, which is heavily subsidised and serves wine, Pellegrino, pasta, soup, meat and salad. And Cucinelli pays his employees a higher wage than the market rate.

Mead also reports that when “the financial crisis hit, in the fall of 2008, Cucinelli called his employees together and assured them that he would not lay anyone off for eighteen months; in return, he asked them to be more expansive in their thinking.”

Some of Cucinelli’s enlightened lordliness is a result of his passion for philosophy—he counts Marcus Aurelius, Plato, Kant and St Francis of Assisi amongst his many “teachers”. (Two incongruous names he also includes on this list are Charlie Chaplin and President Obama.) Familial hardship has also played a role.

Cucinelli’s formative teenage years were spent, not in small Solomeo, but in the nearby city of Perugia, where his father found work in a cement factory.  

“They didn’t beat him, but still they treated him like a slave,” Cucinelli has said. “My father was humiliated. He didn’t make much money at all. His work didn’t do anything to make life more beautiful. He worked in a very tough environment.”

Cucinelli believes in a form of capitalism, but would like it to be “slightly more human.” He cites the contrast drawn by the 4th century saint St John Chrysostom (St John of the “golden mouth”) between “the riches of plunder, those of the man who steals and hoards...[and] the good riches of the man who transforms and distributes, and by so doing, renews life”.

Cucinelli has no interest in industry jargon, and to call his approach a “workplace health and wellbeing program” hardly does it justice. Indeed, in The New Yorker Mead wryly observes that Cucinelli has enacted “a peculiar fantasy of beneficent feudalism, with himself as the enlightened overlord, and the residents, many of them his employees, as the appreciative underlings.”

Mead’s all-American scepticism highlights the historical and cultural differences that would make it impossible to simply transplant Cucinelli’s approach into an American, or indeed Australian, context. We do not share Italy’s rich artisanal history, nor is Cucinelli’s century’s-deep rootedness-to-place shared by many Australians.    

Bob Mitchell, a retailer based in Connecticut, USA, admires Cucinelli’s approach but admits that there is no instant way to replicate it. “You walk around Solomeo, and you see people smiling and happy to be there. There is an intangible that is not something you can create quickly.”

However, a recognition that change a la Cucinelli can only occur slowly, with sensitivity towards local particularities and peculiarities, is not a reason that such change should not be attempted. Even on antipodean soil.

Much of the information that appears above was drawn from Rebecca Mead's fascinating profile of Cucinelli, "The Prince of Solomeo." The New Yorker, March 29, 2010.