When he was younger and very idealistic, Leandro Gualtieri dreamed of being a poet. At age 45, and the principal owner of Filpucci, the world's largest producer of fancy yarns, Gualtieri says with irony, "I became a Prato business poet."
Prato, the not-so-picturesque industrial stepchild of Florence, devotes about 95 percent of its collective energies to the production of textiles and the manufacturing of apparel. Humbly born and raised in the Tuscan hills above Prato, Gualtieri turned to textiles, as he quite simply admits with a very Italian shrug of the shoulders. "I didn't have much of an opportunity to do anything else."
