Aurelio Peccei (; 4 July 1908 – 14 March 1984), was an Italian industrialist and philanthropist, best known as co-founder with Alexander King and first president of the Club of Rome, an organisation which attracted considerable public attention in 1972 with its report, The Limits to Growth. Early life Peccei was born on 4 July 1908 in Turin, the capital of the Piedmont region of Italy. He spent his youth there, eventually graduating from the University of Turin with a degree in economics in 1930. Soon thereafter he went to the Sorbonne with a scholarship and was awarded a free trip to the Soviet Union. His knowledge of other languages brought him to Fiat S.p.A. Although under continual suspicion as an anti-fascist in the early-1930s, in 1935 a successful mission for Fiat in China established his position in Fiat management. During World War II, Peccei joined the anti-fascist movement and the resistance, when he was a member of the "Giustizia e Libertà". He was arrested, imprisoned, and tortured. After 11 months in prison he was freed in January 1945. Business ventures After the war, Peccei was engaged in the rebuilding of Fiat. He was concurrently involved in various private and public efforts then underway to rebuild Italy, including the founding of Alitalia. In 1949, he went to Latin America for Fiat, to restart their operations, as Fiat operations in Latin America had been halted during the war. He settled in Argentina, where he was to live for a decade with his family. He realised that it would make sense to start manufacturing locally and set up the Argentine subsidiary, Fiat-Concord, which built cars and tractors. Fiat-Concord rapidly became one of the most successful automotive firms in Latin America. In 1958, with the backing of Fiat, Peccei founded Italconsult (a para-public joint consultancy venture involving major Italian firms such as Fiat, Innocenti, Montecatini), and became its chairman, a position he held until the 1970s, when he became honorary president. Italconsult was an engineering and economic consulting group for developing countries. It operated under Peccei's leadership, on the whole, more as a non-profit consortium. Italconsult was regarded by Peccei as a way of helping tackle the problems of the Third World, which he had come to know first-hand in Latin America. In 1964, Peccei was asked to become president of Olivetti. Olivetti was facing significant difficulties at that time due to the