Calisto Tanzi: The family man who milked his own dairy empire

The Parmalat story was, for several decades, a fairy-tale of modern Italy. Tanzi was a 22-year-old university student when his father, proprietor of a grocer's shop in the village of Collecchio, near Parma, died suddenly in 1961. As the oldest son, Calisto did what millions of Italian sons would consider their duty: he abandoned his studies and threw himself into saving the family business.

Today, in those mouth-watering family-run grocers' shops that remain such a striking feature of the Italian townscape, couples like Calisto and Anita, and of similar age, can be seen soldiering away all across the country: wincing under the weight of great haunches of Parma-cured prosciutto ham, slicing mortadella and salami, doling out olives and home-ground pesto sauce and coffee; stocking just enough modern pre-packed items (Parmalat yoghurts and fruit juices prominent among them) to persuade customers who like a good chat when they go out shopping, and who don't mind standing in line or paying over the odds, to remain loyal and keep them in business.

That could have been Calisto Tanzi's modest destiny, too. Instead, he did something extraordinary. While keeping his firm as family-centred as it had been in his father's day, he transformed it into a modern and aggressively expansive dairy business. Springing from a region with one of the proudest culinary traditions in the country - chosen last month as the headquarters for the EU's new Food Safety Agency - he turned the family concern into a symbol of Parma's ability to meet the big world head on.

Long Life milk and the Tetrapak were not invented in Italy, but Tanzi was sufficiently on his toes to become their Italian pioneer. He diversified into pasta sauce, biscuits, yoghurts, fruit juice, ice cream. His plain white juggernaut lorries with their crisp sans-serif typeface and the simple petal logo became as familiar on Italy's roads as Tesco's or Sainsbury's are in Britain.

And then there was the world to conquer: so that by the end, in the middle of last month, Parmalat had more than 5,000 employees in Italy, and more than 30,000 in the rest of the world.

Fast forward, It was Mr Tanzi who determined recklessly to preserve his firm's appearance as brilliantly successful, regardless of the cost in lies, falsification, forgery and fraud; wilfully blind to the fact that the only possible conclusion of such a course was what he is now in the thick of: bankruptcy, jail, disgrace.