Roman Giant

Some time late next spring, the Watergate section of Washington, D.C., a mile and a half north of the Lincoln Memorial, will begin life anew. On a ten-acre site along the Potomac, construction gangs will start throwing up a handsomely designed $65 million building complex that will include three high-rise apartment houses, 17 villas, a hotel, a shopping mall and an office building.

Since the new Watergate project will replace an abandoned gasworks, Washingtonians might have been expected to greet it with delight. Instead, a number of architects and critics are protesting vigorously that Watergate would hog Washington's skyline and dwarf nearby federal buildings. Watergate's architects pacified some of these critics with modest design changes, but are still fighting off an outfit called Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which sees dark meanings in the fact that Watergate is to be built by Italy's Societa Generale Immobiliare, in which the Vatican holds an estimated 20% stock interest.

Even Football Fields. All but unknown in the U.S. until recently, Immobiliare, with assets of $100 million, is the largest Italian real estate and construction company. Founded in Turin in 1862, Immobiliare moved to Rome with the unification of Italy in 1870, and laid the foundations of its present prosperity by buying up pasture land around the Eternal City. Since then, Rome's population has swollen from 215,000 to more than 2,000,000, and as Rome has grown so has Immobiliare. In 1961 the company's after-tax profits hit a record $4,000,000.

Immobiliare no longer likes to be a landlord. Instead, it builds and sells whole suburbs of apartments and homes, and throws in all the amenities from roads and utilities to churches and football fields. Even its apartments it sells on a "condominium" basis: the customer buys the apartment and thereafter can sell, rent or mortgage it on his own. In Italy, Immobiliare's prices for houses and apartments range from $7,000 to a top of $35,000, but in Washington's Watergate some of the posher pleasure domes will go for $100,000.

Management by Computer. Though the Fiat automobile company and other lay investors now hold substantial interests in Immobiliare, the Vatican is the company's largest single stockholder, and three members of Rome's "Black" nobility, including a nephew of Pope Pius XII, sit on Immobiliare's board. The man who runs things at Immobiliare is Aldo Samaritani, 58, the company's shrewd, publicity-shunning general manager.

Samaritani is described by some of his colleagues as "a human computer." An ex-banker who joined Immobiliare in 1933, he has been the man primarily responsible for converting the company from a land investment firm into the construction titan it now is. Washington's Watergate project is part of his latest drive to diversify Immobiliare by moving abroad. Besides Watergate, Immobiliare is now building apartment houses in Paris and Montreal, and is negotiating to build three 45-story office buildings in Montreal's Victoria Square, the heart of the city's financial district.

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