THE FIRST TIME Diego Della Valle visited Rome's Colosseum, he was 11 years old and arrived in a bus stuffed with clamoring kids from his grammar school in Casette d'Ete, a village in Italy's central Marche region. The journey, which required circumventing the rugged Apennine mountain range, took over eight hours.
"But it was like a party," the 60-year-old president and CEO of the luxury leather goods company Tod's says now, his smile softened with nostalgia. "We loved every minute of it."
Fifty years later, Della Valle has made the exact same journey in 30 minutes, this time zooming over the mountains in his private jet. "I would've taken the helicopter, which is even faster," he adds, "but I was worried about the weather."
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