Man of steel undaunted by poverty and kidnap In the lobby of Marcegaglia Group's big glass-fronted headquarters in the northern Italian province of Mantua stands a rusty Moto Guzzi scooter with a large handmade wire basket. Steno Marcegaglia, founder of the steel multinational, kept it there as a reminder of his company's origins. It was 1959 when a young and impecunious Marcegaglia struck on his great idea. Houses were rapidly being built and the slatted roller blinds by then being used instead of shutters were causing problems for local builders. In a small workshop he and a friend bent narrow iron bars into U shapes to guide the wooden blinds - delivering them on that red two-wheeler he had bought with his first earnings. The business was an instant success. As Mantua and the surrounding region began to thrive, he shifted his focus from houses to factories and raised a loan from a local bank to start producing steel tubes. Marcegaglia, who has died aged 83, became one of the great entrepreneurs of the Italian industrial boom that followed the second world war. With annual revenues that last year totalled €4.2bn, the group employs 6,500 and has 50 plants in locations as far-flung as China, Brazil and Russia as well as Italy. Yet it has remained a family outfit, these days run by his daughter Emma and son Antonio. They survive him along with his wife Mira, whom he married in 1962. Marcegaglia was born on August 9 1930 to an all but destitute family near Verona. His father sought to escape the poverty of rural Italy by migrating to Eritrea as part of Benito Mussolini's empire-building attempts in Africa; when his mother found a job nearby with relatives working in an inn, she brought her boy to the small community of Gazoldo degli Ippoliti. The son would never move again. When I was a child they asked me what I wanted to be when I was older. I said the Pope, Il Duce or the King. I became the King of Tubes," the weathered tycoon would say with delight in describing his life to visitors. His grit was in evidence early on. Unable to afford the bus, he cycled 40km a day to the city of Mantua and back to earn a qualification in geometry. The knowledge he acquired allowed him an understanding of how to work with metal. After his early income funded not only the scooter but his father's repatriation from the Horn of Africa, he set about turning the backwater of Gazoldo into an unlikely outpost of the global steel industry. He was very poor but he wanted to be an important person. He always wanted to keep growing," Ms Marcegaglia - Italy's most prominent businesswoman and head of Business Europe, the continent's largest trade lobby - said of her father this year. In one early attempt to make steel tubes he blew all the town's electricity for several hours. Wealth and fame came with a later price. He was kidnapped in 1982 while leaving a factory he had recently bought in Naples and was passed to the "Ndrangheta, the Calabrian mafia. They took him to Aspromonte, a rugged, hard-to-reach region in the toe of Italy, where he was held for 51 days. He tried to escape, was recaptured but in the ensuing tussle was spotted by a police helicopter and freed. Telling a business forum 15 years later about the ordeal, he said he had shunned a chance to kill his captor. While the kidnapper was sleeping I took his pistol. I could not do it. It was a matter of ethics. To decide not to kill a man who has kidnapped you even though you can. It is the same matter of ethics that instructs a businessman not to take advantage of his workers and abuse them," he said. Like many who founded businesses during the wild west of Italy's postwar revival, though, Marcegaglia had run-ins with the judiciary. He was convicted of fraud alongside other prominent businessmen and bankers in 2006 in the bankruptcy of a property company but the ruling was thrown out on appeal in 2009. But his early experience of poverty informed his outlook for life. Marcegaglia poured his earnings back into the business and the town. "I am a poor entrepreneur, in a rich company," he was fond of saying. Allergic to the idea of bringing in outside investors, he spared nothing on the factory, which was replete with gilded statues of lions. Latterly, he had an enormous portrait of himself painted on to the side of the building. He transformed Gazoldo not only with the headquarters that sits like a shiny spaceship amid green fields but by providing employment for three generations of local families. Mayor for a decade, he also sat on the board of the local Banca Agricola Mantovana. This week, so respects could be paid, Marcegaglia's body lay in its coffin in the factory foyer - alongside his cherished Moto Guzzi.