The Pirelli Foundation at Archivi Aperti 2025: Discovering Postwar Milan Through Photography and Creativity
For the 11th edition of Archivi Aperti (“Open Archives”), the event promoted by Rete Fotografia to highlight photographic heritage, the Pirelli Foundation is organising an educational workshop for secondary school students on 23 October 2025. This initiative follows the theme proposed for the 2025 edition, “Resistant Photography: The Role of Images in Historical Narration.” Through a national conference, guided tours, public talks, and workshops for schools, the programme will examine how photography acts as a powerful means for constructing, reconstructing, and consolidating memory.
The workshop takes participants on a historical and visual journey, weaving together archival photographs and other documentary sources. The students will be led on a symbolic exploration of a vast postwar factory to observe and interpret the transformations of the industrial world: its roles, faces, and the dynamics of labour. At the same time, they will be invited to wander, as it were, through the streets of Milan, a city that in those years was undergoing profound changes, driven by an energetic push towards modernity and progress.
The Pirelli Foundation holds a photographic archive comprising thousands of images from the nineteenth century to the present day. These of pictures document not only the growth of a great company, but also the sweeping social, economic, and cultural changes in Italy, particularly in the crucial postwar years of reconstruction and the economic boom. The photographs reveal a nation in transformation. They capture scenes of daily life, workplaces, and building sites for the infrastructure of the future, alongside rapidly changing cityscapes, factories and public buildings, the faces of both male and female machine operators, bicycles and cars in the streets, and luminous advertising signs.
Taking inspiration from archive photographs and the screenplay Questa è la nostra città (“This is Our City”)—commissioned in 1947 from Alberto Moravia and Roberto Rossellini to mark Pirelli’s 75th anniversary—the students will be invited to create and write a scene of their own, set in post-war Milan. This creative exercise, weaving together visual and literary sources, will give rise to a new narrative that revisits, with fresh eyes, factory life during the years of reconstruction.
Schools wishing to take part may write to scuole@fondazionepirelli.org
For the 11th edition of Archivi Aperti (“Open Archives”), the event promoted by Rete Fotografia to highlight photographic heritage, the Pirelli Foundation is organising an educational workshop for secondary school students on 23 October 2025. This initiative follows the theme proposed for the 2025 edition, “Resistant Photography: The Role of Images in Historical Narration.” Through a national conference, guided tours, public talks, and workshops for schools, the programme will examine how photography acts as a powerful means for constructing, reconstructing, and consolidating memory.
The workshop takes participants on a historical and visual journey, weaving together archival photographs and other documentary sources. The students will be led on a symbolic exploration of a vast postwar factory to observe and interpret the transformations of the industrial world: its roles, faces, and the dynamics of labour. At the same time, they will be invited to wander, as it were, through the streets of Milan, a city that in those years was undergoing profound changes, driven by an energetic push towards modernity and progress.
The Pirelli Foundation holds a photographic archive comprising thousands of images from the nineteenth century to the present day. These of pictures document not only the growth of a great company, but also the sweeping social, economic, and cultural changes in Italy, particularly in the crucial postwar years of reconstruction and the economic boom. The photographs reveal a nation in transformation. They capture scenes of daily life, workplaces, and building sites for the infrastructure of the future, alongside rapidly changing cityscapes, factories and public buildings, the faces of both male and female machine operators, bicycles and cars in the streets, and luminous advertising signs.
Taking inspiration from archive photographs and the screenplay Questa è la nostra città (“This is Our City”)—commissioned in 1947 from Alberto Moravia and Roberto Rossellini to mark Pirelli’s 75th anniversary—the students will be invited to create and write a scene of their own, set in post-war Milan. This creative exercise, weaving together visual and literary sources, will give rise to a new narrative that revisits, with fresh eyes, factory life during the years of reconstruction.
Schools wishing to take part may write to scuole@fondazionepirelli.org
