Storia di un’impresa familiare. Le «Officine meccaniche Massari» tra Salento, Nord-Africa ed Europa mediterranea (1943-1988)

History of a family business. The "Massari mechanical workshops" between Salento, North Africa and Mediterranean Europe (1943-1988) In light of the renewed interest in family businesses, which has attracted attention for the resistance-longevity nexus of family businesses in a medium-long term perspective, this contribution intends to retrace the events of the “Massari mechanical workshops” of San Pancrazio Salentino in the province of Brindisi. Established in 1943 as a small artisan workshop for the repair of agricultural machines, Massari mechanical workshops established themselves in the “specialized offer” sector and experienced multiple stages of expansion thanks to the entrepreneurial initiatives and management skills of the founder, Pancrazio Massari (1918-1990), who initially manages to seize the opportunities offered by the state incentives linked to the Institute for land reform and starting from the 1960s, to project himself onto international markets, looking at North Africa and at both sides of Mediterranean Europe as a privileged outlet. It is a business model that combines dynamism, specialization, innovation and flexibility, also thanks to the ability to diversify production and to remodel commercial outcomes with respect to economic conditions. The Massari mechanical workshops overcome the crisis of the seventies and manage to “resist” until the very early eighties, when a series of exogenous and endogenous criticalities mark its gradual crisis until its failure, which occurred in 1988.