Why the Italian energy company Eni chose a six-legged dog for its logo
The emblem of Eni, Italy's oil and gas giant, is an imaginary dog with six legs. Chosen in 1952 as the company was taking shape, it stands for a car's four wheels plus the two legs of its driver, a mascot for a country about to take to the road on Italian fuel.
Eni grew out of Agip, a state company set up in 1926 to find and sell oil, and was founded in 1953 with Enrico Mattei as chairman. Mattei challenged the big Western oil firms by offering producing countries a far more equal role. From 1954 Eni signed exploration deals in Egypt built around joint ventures, and in 1957 it pushed a similar arrangement, later called the Mattei formula, with Iran's shah and national oil company. In 1960 it even agreed to import cheap Soviet crude.
Mattei did not see where this led. On 27 October 1962 his plane exploded near Bascapè while flying from Catania to Milan. It was first treated as an accident, but trial records later confirmed it as murder, carried out to protect powerful economic and political interests. His company kept expanding, signing supply deals across North Africa and, after the 1973 oil crisis, a gas agreement with Algeria's Sonatrach that fed the Trans-Mediterranean Pipeline to Sicily.
The state company became a joint-stock firm in 1992, listed in Milan and New York in 1995, and sold 70 percent of its capital to private investors over four share offers by 1998. Over the years it has dabbled in everything from nuclear power and chemicals to hotels, textiles and news. Today it counts as one of the world's supermajors, with the Italian government keeping a stake of about a third.
Eni has also invested in computing and fusion. Its HPC6 supercomputer, launched in November 2024, ranked as Europe's most powerful and fifth in the world. In 2018 it became the first shareholder of Commonwealth Fusion Systems, an MIT spin-out building a compact tokamak, which in 2021 tested a full-scale high-temperature superconducting magnet.
Source: Eni
