The banker who was a friend of Archduke Charles, Mussolini and Marshal Tito

Sunday, May 21, 1922, Catalan motorsport fans had an unmissable date in their calendars because on that day the second edition of the Armangué Trophy for cars was held. The competition was named in honor of Josep Maria Armangué Feliu, a speed pioneer who died prematurely in a plane crash (we dedicated a profile of this series to him on September 25, 2022) and served to bring together both local and foreign drivers. The main attraction of the race was the promising Austro-Daimlers, especially the one driven by Alfred Neubauer, who had performed very creditably in the Targa Florio held a few weeks earlier. At the end of the first lap of the Tarragona circuit, when Neubauer had set the best time, a tragic accident with several deaths forced the race to be stopped and the Czech was left without a victory. He would never be a great star on the track, but he was a fundamental racing head for Daimler for many years. The one who had given him the opportunity to enter the world of speed and who financed the Austro-Daimler racing team was Camillo Castiglioni, a banker considered the richest man in central Europe during World War I.

Born in the city of Trieste, now Italy, but then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he was the son of the city's chief rabbi. After a youth with a certain tendency towards dissipation, his father sent him to Istanbul, where he had a relative, to learn about business. Back in Europe, settled in Vienna, he took advantage of the family's connections with the rubber world to start working in a multinational company in the sector that had ties precisely with a tire manufacturer in the Ottoman capital. It was his first contact with the automotive industry that would later make him a millionaire. During this Viennese period, he frequented the royal court, to the point of striking up a friendship with Archduke Charles.

He soon became fond of the nascent aeronautical industry, as evidenced by his involvement in the creation of the Wiener Aero-Club, founded three years before the Wright brothers' first flight. Seeing the great business opportunities offered by both the passion for hot air balloons and the burgeoning aviation, he launched his own aeronautical company. The experience accumulated in the sector was key, when World War I broke out, to position himself in a privileged position regarding the manufacture of combat aircraft through his firm, Hansa und Brandenburgische Flugzeugwerke. The next step was, as we started at the beginning, the acquisition of the car manufacturer Austro-Daimler, which made him a lot of money. Later he would repeat the operation with another car brand, BMW, which he developed until it became one of the great ones in Europe, a plan in which he had the key collaboration of his chief engineer, Ferdinand Porsche, who would later build his own project with great success. During the war conflict, he had multiplied his fortune by speculating on financial markets, but in 1924 his currency bets proved wrong and two years later his financial empire collapsed like a house of cards, also taking down the Austrian Depositenbank, which he presided over. Having an Italian passport was very useful for him to be able to flee from the Austrian financial authorities.

In the city of Milan he tried to start anew, and there he founded a bank that allowed him to rebuild his fortune. He also established very close ties with Mussolini, whom, according to some sources, he tried to convince – unsuccessfully, as is known – to remain neutral during World War II. Incidentally, just as the great European conflagration ended, and due to his friendship with Marshal Tito, he obtained an international loan that saved in extremis Yugoslavia's finances, but later Tito did not pay him the agreed commission and the relationship ended up in court with a large building in Belgrade seized to settle the debt.

Both in his Austrian and Italian periods, he stood out for dedicating large sums of money to art and culture, proof of this is the financial support he provided to the Theater in der Josefstadt in Vienna, and also to the Mozarteum in Salzburg. His art collection was the most important in Europe in his time, but it was completely fragmented following his downfall in the mid-twenties.