For 50 years, Maurizio Zanella has gone for extremist causes.
The first time he flunked out of high school was at a posh Milan parochial school in 1969, when, Zanella remembers, “I joined the Communist revolution.”
After that, Zanella’s father, a successful European logistics entrepreneur, placed him in public school. “There,
everybody was a Communist, so I became a fascist,” Zanella says, a broad, infectious smile stretching across his face. “I was playing war. I wasn’t a real Communist or fascist. It was just an excuse to not go to school.”
As Zanella flunked his second year, street violence between factions escalated. After a friend of Zanella’s died from injuries in one clash, Zanella’s father sent him off to Manchester, England, for months of physical labor on the docks. On his return, he was sent to live in the Lombardy countryside, on the modest family farm known as Ca’ del Bosco.