Access the Online Archive
Search the Historical Archive of the Pirelli Foundation for sources and materials. Select the type of support you are interested in and write the keywords of your research.
    Select one of the following categories
  • Documents
  • Photographs
  • Drawings and posters
  • Audio-visuals
  • Publications and magazines
  • All
Help with your research
To request to view the materials in the Historical Archive and in the libraries of the Pirelli Foundation for study and research purposes and/or to find out how to request the use of materials for loans and exhibitions, please fill in the form below. You will receive an email confirming receipt of the request and you will be contacted.
Pirelli Foundation Educational Courses

Select the education level of the school
Back
Primary schools
Pirelli Foundation Educational Courses
Please fill in your details and the staff of Pirelli Foundation Educational will contact you to arrange the dates of the course.

I declare I have read  the privacy policy, and authorise the Pirelli Foundation to process my personal data in order to send communications, also by email, about initiatives/conferences organised by the Pirelli Foundation.

Back
Lower secondary school
Pirelli Foundation Educational Courses
Please fill in your details and the staff of Pirelli Foundation Educational will contact you to arrange the dates of the course.
Back
Upper secondary school
Pirelli Foundation Educational Courses
Please fill in your details and the staff of Pirelli Foundation Educational will contact you to arrange the dates of the course.
Back
University
Pirelli Foundation Educational Courses

Do you want to organize a training programme with your students? For information and reservations, write to universita@fondazionepirelli.org

Visit the Foundation
For information on the Foundation's activities and admission to the spaces,
please call +39 0264423971 or write to visite@fondazionepirelli.org

Adolfo Consolini: A “Pirelli Giant” at the Olympics

November 1948: when Pirelli magazine carried a portrait of him under the title “Style and Power”, Adolfo Consolini had been an employee of A.G.A. (Articoli Gomma e Affini, a Pirelli Group subsidiary) for almost a year. As an official “producer”, he used to go around Milan on his scooter offering shopkeepers various rubber items such as car mats, household items, and toys. At five in the afternoon he would invariably be at the Pirelli sports field in Viale Sarca, right in front of the Bicocca factory, for his customary training session. Because this rubber-goods salesman had for some months also been an Olympic gold medallist as a discus thrower: in London 1948, where he took top spot with 52.78 metres. The thirty-year-old from Verona – standing 183 cm tall and weighing in at 99 kilos – also held the world record for that year, with 55.33 metres.

In other words, Pirelli’s A.G.A. had a true champion in its midst. Pirelli magazine returned to Consolini in 1950, with a fine article entitled “Athletes to Illustrate Gulliver” by Corrado Pizzinelli. With the athlete, who in the meantime had won yet another gold, at the European Championships in Brussels, was his colleague Teseo Taddia, who had also been working at A.G.A. for some time. And he too was a champion: throwing the hammer 54.73 metres and winning silver in Brussels. These champions were “two giants who look as though they’re straight out of an illustration for Gulliver’s trip to Brobdingnag”, according to the journalist Pizzinelli, “but who have no custom-built cars, nor villas, nor even any industries. Two archangels of sport, candid, starry-eyed, pure, simple, and poor”. Consolini tells of how he was about to indulge in a few days’ holiday by the sea, to enjoy his world record, when along comes the American Fortune Everett Gordien and snatches his record from him: “How can one stay calm? Me, you know, there’s no way! I tore up the note and went off to train…”

Consolini went on to three more Olympic Games, winning silver in Helsinki 1952. Melbourne 1956 and Rome 1960 were to be where one of the greatest and best-loved Italian athletes would bow out, with great honour. Meanwhile, he had married the Slovenian Hanny Cuk in 1951 and their son Sergio was born in 1956. The Pirelli house organ Fatti e Notizie devoted a page to his wedding with Hanny, with “best wishes from all Pirelliani to Adolfo Consolini and his esteemed spouse”. Consolini was an expert in rubber products – in addition to the wood and metal of his discus, of course – but he also learnt to handle horseshoes: in 1953 he played the part of the farrier Maciste in the film Cronache di poveri amanti, which the filmmaker Carlo Lizzani based on the novel by Vasco Pratolini. Legend has it that, turning a quarrel scene, he acted with such realism that he really did knock out the great Marcello Mastroianni.

Consolini died on 20 December 1969 at the age of fifty-two. For some time he had been the manager of the Finished Products Warehouse at Milano Bicocca, overseeing a dozen workers. “You could hardly say he was a traditional boss,” recalls a worker, Alfredo, in Fatti e Notizie. “We had such a level of collaboration with him that he’d even be helping us load and unload the goods”. From our archive, another story of sport, another story of factory work.

November 1948: when Pirelli magazine carried a portrait of him under the title “Style and Power”, Adolfo Consolini had been an employee of A.G.A. (Articoli Gomma e Affini, a Pirelli Group subsidiary) for almost a year. As an official “producer”, he used to go around Milan on his scooter offering shopkeepers various rubber items such as car mats, household items, and toys. At five in the afternoon he would invariably be at the Pirelli sports field in Viale Sarca, right in front of the Bicocca factory, for his customary training session. Because this rubber-goods salesman had for some months also been an Olympic gold medallist as a discus thrower: in London 1948, where he took top spot with 52.78 metres. The thirty-year-old from Verona – standing 183 cm tall and weighing in at 99 kilos – also held the world record for that year, with 55.33 metres.

In other words, Pirelli’s A.G.A. had a true champion in its midst. Pirelli magazine returned to Consolini in 1950, with a fine article entitled “Athletes to Illustrate Gulliver” by Corrado Pizzinelli. With the athlete, who in the meantime had won yet another gold, at the European Championships in Brussels, was his colleague Teseo Taddia, who had also been working at A.G.A. for some time. And he too was a champion: throwing the hammer 54.73 metres and winning silver in Brussels. These champions were “two giants who look as though they’re straight out of an illustration for Gulliver’s trip to Brobdingnag”, according to the journalist Pizzinelli, “but who have no custom-built cars, nor villas, nor even any industries. Two archangels of sport, candid, starry-eyed, pure, simple, and poor”. Consolini tells of how he was about to indulge in a few days’ holiday by the sea, to enjoy his world record, when along comes the American Fortune Everett Gordien and snatches his record from him: “How can one stay calm? Me, you know, there’s no way! I tore up the note and went off to train…”

Consolini went on to three more Olympic Games, winning silver in Helsinki 1952. Melbourne 1956 and Rome 1960 were to be where one of the greatest and best-loved Italian athletes would bow out, with great honour. Meanwhile, he had married the Slovenian Hanny Cuk in 1951 and their son Sergio was born in 1956. The Pirelli house organ Fatti e Notizie devoted a page to his wedding with Hanny, with “best wishes from all Pirelliani to Adolfo Consolini and his esteemed spouse”. Consolini was an expert in rubber products – in addition to the wood and metal of his discus, of course – but he also learnt to handle horseshoes: in 1953 he played the part of the farrier Maciste in the film Cronache di poveri amanti, which the filmmaker Carlo Lizzani based on the novel by Vasco Pratolini. Legend has it that, turning a quarrel scene, he acted with such realism that he really did knock out the great Marcello Mastroianni.

Consolini died on 20 December 1969 at the age of fifty-two. For some time he had been the manager of the Finished Products Warehouse at Milano Bicocca, overseeing a dozen workers. “You could hardly say he was a traditional boss,” recalls a worker, Alfredo, in Fatti e Notizie. “We had such a level of collaboration with him that he’d even be helping us load and unload the goods”. From our archive, another story of sport, another story of factory work.

Multimedia

Images