????"Turn that off," Sergio Marchionne says, indicating my recorder. Fair enough. He wants to show me a couple of new Chrysler TV ads on his office computer before they are released.

????One is about returning war veterans, narrated by Oprah Winfrey, and the other is about farmers, starring Paul Harvey as the voice of God. Each is also about Chrysler products, of course, but the message -- maudlin but effectual -- is America. "We're the only ones who can speak about Detroit today," says Marchionne, who is the CEO of both Fiat and Chrysler. "We're the smallest of the three, and there's a level of legitimacy associated with us pitching the American story. Which is almost bizarre, because the thing is foreign-owned."

????Chrysler's recent pedigree is complicated. The company was kidnapped by Daimler in 1998, sold into private equity in 2007, and bailed out by the federal government in 2008, and since then it has been sidling step by step into Fiat's fold. The Italian carmaker started buying shares after Chrysler filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2009, and by 2011 it had accumulated a majority stake. Fiat hopes to buy the remaining 41.5% from a UAW retiree trust fund, pending a Delaware court's ruling on what the stake is worth; that could happen this summer. Chrysler, you see, is actually Fiat.

????But Fiat, if we keep going, is really Exor, an investment company headquartered at the historic Lingotto factory in Turin, Italy, which is where I interviewed Marchionne in a haze of cigarette smoke the day after he returned from the Detroit Auto Show. Besides owning 30% of Fiat, which itself owns Ferrari, Maserati, Lancia, Alfa Romeo, and, oddly, the Turin daily La Stampa, Exor also has big holdings in commercial real estate brokerage (Cushman & Wakefield) and heavy equipment (CNH Industrial, which includes the former Fiat Industrial), and smaller ones in property development (Almacantar), banking (Banca Leonardo), media?(The Economist and Banijay Group), paper (Sequana), and the Turin soccer team Juventus. Total sales in 2012 were $146.3 billion. That puts Exor at No. 26 on this year's Fortune Global 500 list, up 19 spots from last year.

????While Exor is a public company, it is tightly controlled by the descendants of Giovanni Agnelli, who co-founded Fiat (it's an acronym for Fabbrica Italiana di Automobili Torino) in 1899, built it into one of the great industrial enterprises in Europe, and so gave rise to an enduring family fortune. Exor, you see, is the Agnelli family.

????The Agnelli family has one leader, a capo di famiglia. Always one, always male. It was Giovanni Agnelli until he died in 1945. He chose as his successor his grandson and namesake, the Agnelli we knew as Gianni, or l'Avvocato (a nod to his law degree, though he never practiced). Gianni in his prime was brutally handsome, indiscriminately passionate, and daring in the extreme. Born to privilege, he fought on the Russian front in World War II, collected art and automobiles and mistresses, hung out with royalty, wore his wristwatch outside his shirt sleeve, fought the unions and won, and came to personify for the world what it meant to be an Italian man in full during the raucous and glittering middle decades of the 20th century.

????Gianni died in 2003, having left Fiat on the verge of bankruptcy. His successor -- the eldest son of his only daughter -- is a lanky, apple-cheeked, curly-haired engineer who was still a college student when the weight of the family began settling on his shoulders. The new guy has a Germanic last name, drinks tea instead of coffee, and prefers family outings to nights on the town. But as a businessman? He's still just 37, and he has held the CEO title at Exor only since 2011, but considering the good things that have happened on his watch -- the stabilization of Fiat, the successful investment in Chrysler, the reorganization of the far-flung family empire -- he could outshine his ancestors. The Agnelli family, today, is John Elkann.