If Bondi, the chairman, ultimately fails to keep Parmalat together, it would be the end of a remarkable Italian success story. The valley around this north-central Italian city sees itself as being to food what Silicon Valley is to electronics: a place of excellence and commercial success.
Thousands of small companies sprouting like fine mushrooms, most of them more craftsmen than industrialists, have for generations produced Parma ham, Parmesan cheese and all manner of pasta from agnolini to ziti.
Among the mushrooms stood a few oaks, like the Barilla brothers, whose huge factories lie just north of the city looking more like aircraft assembly plants than pasta works. Tanzi was another.
From the village of Collecchio, just up the Taro River valley from Parma, Calisto Tanzi, the son of a maker of hams and preserves, built his company, Parmalat, whose name comes from Parma and the Italian word latte, for milk, into one of the world's biggest dairy products companies.
"The strategy was beautiful, it was a global leader in food," said Guido Corbetta, an economist at the Bocconi University Business School in Milan.
Indeed, Tanzi's path differed widely from that taken by most of the entrepreneurs of Parma. While most built their success on traditional local products, like cheeses and hams, Tanzi's was based on modern innovation. He was also among the first in Parma to recognize the importance of branded foods, even for items as everyday as milk.
By the late 1960s, Parmalat was branching out into other innovative products, like long-life cream and milk substitutes. The drive into new products was accompanied by geographical growth, both in Europe and the Americas.
By the mid-1990s, Parmalat had pushed into the US, urging skeptical Americans to change age old habits of drinking only fresh cold milk. Tanzi spent US$2 million to introduce the milk in New York by sponsoring the Italian tenor Luciano Pavarotti in a free concert in Central Park.
A huge ad budget highlighted the convenience of long-life milk.
By last year, Parmalat was generating roughly a third its global revenue of 7.6 billion euros (US$9.4 billion) in North America, much of it thanks to the long-life milk.
But success began to sour last month, when Parmalat reported an investment of 500 million euros (US$619 million) in Epicurum, a hedge fund based in Cayman Islands. The company then sought to calm investors by saying it would recover the money, but has been unable to do so.
The company has also disclosed that a Citigroup vehicle Buconero -- or "black hole" in Italian -- had invested in a Parmalat unit, which then lent the money to other parts of the company.
Last week, Standard & Poor's cut its credit rating on Parmalat eight notches to junk. On Friday, S&P lowered its rating to D -- for default -- its lowest rating.
Shares of Parmalat plunged 66 percent on Friday, and have fallen 87 percent since the beginning of this month. The Tanzi family, which still owns 51 percent of the company, has seen its holdings shrivel up.
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