Agostino Rocca

Agostino Rocca (1895 – 17 February 1978) was an Italian businessman.

Agostino Rocca was born in 1895 in Milan. His family relocated to Rome early in his childhood, and he completed secondary school studies at the Collegio Militare di Roma. He enrolled at the Accademia Militare di Torino in 1913, but left to enroll in the Italian Army at the outset of World War I. He enrolled in the Politecnico di Milano in 1921 and married Maria Queirazza; by then, had joined the Italian Fascist movement led by Benito Mussolini, who would be elected premier in 1922.

Rocca began as an engineering apprentice at Dalmine, a steel maker, in 1923. He later became a financial advisor, and worked for a number of prominent Italian firms, mainly in the manufacturing sector. He was made part of the Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale (IRI), the centerpiece of the Mussolini regime's corporate state, in 1933, and joined the body's military industries committee, becoming a member of the board of directors of a number of venerable names in Italian industry and engineering, notably Dalmine and Ansaldo, and overseeing their conversion into defense contractors ahead of hostilities leading to World War II.

He was appointed to the powerful post of director of Finsider, the IRI's financial arm, in 1938, but began distancing himself from Mussolini in 1941, and was dismissed. The transfer of the retreating Mussolini regime into northern Italy, and the declaration of the Italian Social Republic over the area in 1943, led Rocca to break with the regime, joining the British-sponsored opposition group Otto, and suffering arrest in Asti and Milan. Following the fall of the regime, he was arrested in Milan in April 1945 on the charge of collaborationism, but no longer an executive or administrator, and a belated opponent of the deposed fascist state, Rocca was released without charges. He founded the Compagnia Tecnica Internazionale (Italian, Technical International Company) in September 1945.

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