By Christian Plumb
TURIN, Italy, Jan 24 (Reuters) - Fiat car workers on Friday put down their tools to mourn the group's patriarch Gianni Agnelli, then returned to worrying about a future without the staunchest defender of the group's cash-bleeding auto arm.
"Today there's just a great sadness that he's gone," said Nicola Palaia, a 15-year veteran of the company's Mirafiori plant who stood for a minute of silence in Agnelli's honour.
"Now the driver's seat is empty."
Palaia was one of hundreds of workers who poured through the gates of the sprawling grey stone factory in Turin that in its halcyon days employed some 50,000 workers, more than Fiat Auto does now in all of Italy.
They said they worried that with Agnelli's passing their own shaky futures had become even less secure.
"We'll be a lot less protected," said Aldo Caltagirone, like Palaia dressed in a standard-issue army green jacket emblazoned with the Fiat logo. "I think he'll be difficult to replace."
Mirafiori, which makes slow-selling models like the Punto and Panda, was one of several plants targeted for layoffs by Fiat last year as it cut thousands of auto workers jobs to scale back overcapacity.
Some 2,000 jobs are set to be cut at the windowless plant, built in the Fascist era before World War Two and which saw capacity mushroom during Italy's post-war boom years.
Though some blamed the managers selected by Gianni and other members of the Fiat-founding Agnelli family for the auto business' current crisis, most described its fallen leader as a great man who had treated the company's workers with respect.
Workers called off a two-hour strike planned for Friday as a measure of respect for a man who one radio commentator referred to as the prince of Turin, Fiat's headquarter city.
GIANNI'S STATURE
But some of the Fiat rank and file said their sadness was mixed with increasing anxiety about the company's current leadership, including Agnelli's younger brother Umberto, widely tipped to take over the chairman's job later this year.
"His brother doesn't have the same stature, and then there are the banks and so many other capitalists who are part of the picture," said Luciano Atzei, who has worked the Mirafiori assembly line for 27 years.
"I see nothing positive in the future."
Many said the death of Gianni, whose battle with prostate cancer was public knowledge, would make scant difference.
"The company hasn't been in his hands for quite some time," said Donatella Romeo, part of a crowd of workers outside the factory, where flags flew at half mast and buses were needed to move workers around the giant plant.
"Let's hope that they have a good handle on the situation."
FIAT'S DORMITORY
Elsewhere in Turin, which is trying to shed its reputation as a factory town, reactions were mixed. Some hoped the death of the man most closely associated with Italy's most famous company could allow the city to take on a new life.
"Gianni Agnelli is a person who did his job well and gave work to a lot of people because it suited him," said Giampiero Padulla, who 30 years ago was one of thousands of workers from the impoverished south lured to jobs in Fiat's then booming factories but who stayed with the company for only 10 years.
"The fact is that Turin is Fiat's dormitory," he added. "So many other activities have left. I'd like to see a Turin with Mirafiori but also with so much more."
The Winter Olympics, which Turin is hosting in 2006, could provide the city with one focus for a post-industrial future.
Even there, it will be hard to get over the absence of Gianni, who local officials say spearheaded the campaign to bring the winter games to the city Italy's royal family once called home.