Moravia, the factory and the tale of a missing film. Unresolved conflicts between industry and literature
In a discussion about factories, work, creativity, technology, fatigue, conflict, production routines and transformation, we must come to terms with an industrial civilisation marked by complex tensions that cannot be reduced to traditional class conflict patterns. To do so, we must analyse all of its characteristics and enter into the tensions and conflicts. To better understand its nuances, we should not only use the frameworks of economics and sociology, but also those of literature, figurative art, film, and photography. Indeed, a real conversation. To use a term favoured by the Enlightenment and Elio Vittorini, the writer who, from 1945 to 1947, tried to radically renew Italian culture with Il Politecnico, linking humanism and science and leaving a profound imprint on publishing and literature.
“We come to converse with you,” wrote Alberto Pirelli, president of the Milanese multinational founded by his father Giovanni Battista, together with his brother Piero, in the editorial of the first issue of the “Pirelli” magazine in November 1948, an “information and technical” periodical. This was an open and unprejudiced conversation that lasted until 1972 and covered major themes such as economics, technology, art, science, politics, and economic and social transformation. It was guided by prominent intellectuals such as Giuseppe Luraghi, Vittorio Sereni and Leonardo Sinisgalli. Leading figures in Italian culture also contributed, including Eugenio Montale, Salvatore Quasimodo, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Elio Vittorini, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Gio Ponti, Leonardo Sciascia, Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Enzo Biagi and Camilla Cederna.
From the post-war period of dynamic reconstruction to the economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s, it was the season that had also seen the main corporate magazines — including Pirelli’s, Finmeccanica IRI’s Civiltà delle Macchine, Olivetti’s Comunità and Eni’s Il gatto selvatico — among the protagonists of the cultural debate. It was a time where a number of writers, directors, photographers and artists tried to come to terms with modernity in terms of the economy, technology, urbanisation, mass culture, and the radical transformation of consumption and customs.
At the beginning of that season, in the spring and summer of 1947, Pirelli met with director Roberto Rossellini and writer Alberto Moravia to discuss a film that would portray the development of industry through the story of a working-class family. Rossellini was enthusiastic about the project. Moravia quickly set to work, producing a script in a short time. The 109 typewritten pages tell the story of the trials and tribulations of the Riva family, who were Pirelli workers with peasant origins, but who had worked at the Bicocca factory for three generations: grandfather, son, and three grandchildren (Carlo, Angela, and Ida).
It was set against the backdrop of the war that had just ended, the Resistance against the Nazi-fascists, the Liberation and the intense yet arduous beginnings of democracy, civil recovery and productivity. There was also a difficult crossroads between strong hopes for a better quality of life and work, and initial disillusionment about the potential for renewal.
However, the film would never see the light of day. The script, which was kept in the Historical Archives of the Pirelli Foundation for a long time, has now been published by Bompiani under the original title This is Our City. It has been edited by Alessandra Grandelis and features an afterword by Giuseppe Lupo.
So, what happened? The problem lay in the high production costs (75 million lire, a significant sum at a time of difficult recovery, inflation and strict financial controls), but above all in the disagreement between the Pirelli and Moravia patrons.
The script keeps the factory and the combination of antifascism and the world of work that characterised Milan from 1943 to 1945 in the background. It focuses on the conflicts of the latest generation of Rivas, who reject the working-class condition and its values. Instead, they dream of an easy life, quick enrichment and carefree attitudes, even becoming involving in the illegal activities of a criminal gang. This has a tragic outcome: Angela’s death, the blackening of the soul and despair.
In a letter to Alberto Pirelli, Giuseppe Luraghi — a highly cultured manager who would later play a key role in Alfa Romeo’s success, as well as being a publisher — expressed his clear reservations: “It strikes me that, as a Pirelli film, too much emphasis is placed on the shady machinations that form the crux of the narrative. The factory remains peripheral and conventional when it should be the protagonist, not the backdrop, of the story”.
Lupo’s afterword echoes Luraghi’s negative judgement, commenting: “What Luraghi dislikes is that the factory has little impact on the lives of ordinary people or the nation, and is even tinged with immorality, with some characters colluding with petty suburban crime, almost suggesting a link between industrialisation and the underworld — the price to be paid for expanding modernity.”
The headline in the Sunday edition of “Il Sole24Ore” reads “Moravia and the factory: history of a failure”, with excerpts from Lupo’s afterword (18 May).
“Moravia stayed out of the factory”, declares Paolo Di Stefano in an article in the “Corriere della Sera” (12 May) on the publication of “This is our city”. Di Stefano notes: “Perhaps what is missing from Moravia’s account is the technical context of the work that was most important to the client, who was very dissatisfied. However, after the tragedy, the story ends with the factory offering a glimmer of hope.”
Moravia writes: ‘The sirens repeat their call. The train puffs away. The thousand noises of the working factory fill the air, harsh and almost inexorable. In its majestic grandeur and power, the factory seems to level everything, enclosing it in its great embrace. Life and the hard, heavy but necessary and beneficial work of every day begin again.”
In his afterword, Lupo also notes: Moravia “conceived of a film imbued with neo-realism, in the manner of a poetics that, in those years, intertwined existentialism and social issues, loneliness and Fordism.” But it had its limits, including the author’s lack of knowledge of industrial culture and working-class language: “The Milanese periphery does not have the same characteristics as the Roman suburbs. It has a decidedly more civilised feel to it and is the domain of the proletariat, as described by Testori, rather than the under-proletariat, described by Pasolini.”
Ultimately, this was a missed opportunity for a conversation and a film that was never made.
What remains, in the newly published text, is the quality of Moravia’s writing, his taste for imagery, the sophisticated visual language of an intellectual who loves cinema. However, the profound sense of the original relationship between literature and industrial modernity is lost.
Throughout the second half of the 20th century, a large part of contemporary intellectuality missed this challenge, with the exception of Vittorini, Sinisgalli, Sereni, the “Olivettians” (Zorzi, Ottieri and Volponi, to name a few) and the contributors to the aforementioned company magazines. Giuseppe Lupo himself documented its tensions and downfalls in an outstanding essay, “Misunderstood modernity – A counter-history of Italian industry” (Marsilio, 2023).
However, the question of the relationship between literature and modernity remains relevant. It is crucial to develop a new and improved representation of industry and labour at a time when digital technologies and environmental and social sustainability are transforming products, production systems, trade and consumption. The aim is to present the company as not only an economic actor, but also a social, cultural and civil one.
This is an essential challenge. It concerns businesses, which must learn to be increasingly “open” and “connected” — the two terms that characterise the Confindustria Technical Group for Culture’s projects — and thus speak with sincerity and transparency to all stakeholders. This allows them to create economic value by leveraging the general values and interests of the communities they serve.
However, it is also a challenge that engages with cultural, communication and educational environments, involving writers, artists, film and theatre directors, photographers, journalists, TV writers, architects, designers and experts in the digital world and artificial intelligence. With an awareness that doing business means engaging with culture. Cultural enterprise, in all its creative forms, must ultimately recognise an underlying characteristic of Italy: despite the new technological and competitive environment, it remains a major industrial country.
In a discussion about factories, work, creativity, technology, fatigue, conflict, production routines and transformation, we must come to terms with an industrial civilisation marked by complex tensions that cannot be reduced to traditional class conflict patterns. To do so, we must analyse all of its characteristics and enter into the tensions and conflicts. To better understand its nuances, we should not only use the frameworks of economics and sociology, but also those of literature, figurative art, film, and photography. Indeed, a real conversation. To use a term favoured by the Enlightenment and Elio Vittorini, the writer who, from 1945 to 1947, tried to radically renew Italian culture with Il Politecnico, linking humanism and science and leaving a profound imprint on publishing and literature.
“We come to converse with you,” wrote Alberto Pirelli, president of the Milanese multinational founded by his father Giovanni Battista, together with his brother Piero, in the editorial of the first issue of the “Pirelli” magazine in November 1948, an “information and technical” periodical. This was an open and unprejudiced conversation that lasted until 1972 and covered major themes such as economics, technology, art, science, politics, and economic and social transformation. It was guided by prominent intellectuals such as Giuseppe Luraghi, Vittorio Sereni and Leonardo Sinisgalli. Leading figures in Italian culture also contributed, including Eugenio Montale, Salvatore Quasimodo, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Elio Vittorini, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Gio Ponti, Leonardo Sciascia, Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Enzo Biagi and Camilla Cederna.
From the post-war period of dynamic reconstruction to the economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s, it was the season that had also seen the main corporate magazines — including Pirelli’s, Finmeccanica IRI’s Civiltà delle Macchine, Olivetti’s Comunità and Eni’s Il gatto selvatico — among the protagonists of the cultural debate. It was a time where a number of writers, directors, photographers and artists tried to come to terms with modernity in terms of the economy, technology, urbanisation, mass culture, and the radical transformation of consumption and customs.
At the beginning of that season, in the spring and summer of 1947, Pirelli met with director Roberto Rossellini and writer Alberto Moravia to discuss a film that would portray the development of industry through the story of a working-class family. Rossellini was enthusiastic about the project. Moravia quickly set to work, producing a script in a short time. The 109 typewritten pages tell the story of the trials and tribulations of the Riva family, who were Pirelli workers with peasant origins, but who had worked at the Bicocca factory for three generations: grandfather, son, and three grandchildren (Carlo, Angela, and Ida).
It was set against the backdrop of the war that had just ended, the Resistance against the Nazi-fascists, the Liberation and the intense yet arduous beginnings of democracy, civil recovery and productivity. There was also a difficult crossroads between strong hopes for a better quality of life and work, and initial disillusionment about the potential for renewal.
However, the film would never see the light of day. The script, which was kept in the Historical Archives of the Pirelli Foundation for a long time, has now been published by Bompiani under the original title This is Our City. It has been edited by Alessandra Grandelis and features an afterword by Giuseppe Lupo.
So, what happened? The problem lay in the high production costs (75 million lire, a significant sum at a time of difficult recovery, inflation and strict financial controls), but above all in the disagreement between the Pirelli and Moravia patrons.
The script keeps the factory and the combination of antifascism and the world of work that characterised Milan from 1943 to 1945 in the background. It focuses on the conflicts of the latest generation of Rivas, who reject the working-class condition and its values. Instead, they dream of an easy life, quick enrichment and carefree attitudes, even becoming involving in the illegal activities of a criminal gang. This has a tragic outcome: Angela’s death, the blackening of the soul and despair.
In a letter to Alberto Pirelli, Giuseppe Luraghi — a highly cultured manager who would later play a key role in Alfa Romeo’s success, as well as being a publisher — expressed his clear reservations: “It strikes me that, as a Pirelli film, too much emphasis is placed on the shady machinations that form the crux of the narrative. The factory remains peripheral and conventional when it should be the protagonist, not the backdrop, of the story”.
Lupo’s afterword echoes Luraghi’s negative judgement, commenting: “What Luraghi dislikes is that the factory has little impact on the lives of ordinary people or the nation, and is even tinged with immorality, with some characters colluding with petty suburban crime, almost suggesting a link between industrialisation and the underworld — the price to be paid for expanding modernity.”
The headline in the Sunday edition of “Il Sole24Ore” reads “Moravia and the factory: history of a failure”, with excerpts from Lupo’s afterword (18 May).
“Moravia stayed out of the factory”, declares Paolo Di Stefano in an article in the “Corriere della Sera” (12 May) on the publication of “This is our city”. Di Stefano notes: “Perhaps what is missing from Moravia’s account is the technical context of the work that was most important to the client, who was very dissatisfied. However, after the tragedy, the story ends with the factory offering a glimmer of hope.”
Moravia writes: ‘The sirens repeat their call. The train puffs away. The thousand noises of the working factory fill the air, harsh and almost inexorable. In its majestic grandeur and power, the factory seems to level everything, enclosing it in its great embrace. Life and the hard, heavy but necessary and beneficial work of every day begin again.”
In his afterword, Lupo also notes: Moravia “conceived of a film imbued with neo-realism, in the manner of a poetics that, in those years, intertwined existentialism and social issues, loneliness and Fordism.” But it had its limits, including the author’s lack of knowledge of industrial culture and working-class language: “The Milanese periphery does not have the same characteristics as the Roman suburbs. It has a decidedly more civilised feel to it and is the domain of the proletariat, as described by Testori, rather than the under-proletariat, described by Pasolini.”
Ultimately, this was a missed opportunity for a conversation and a film that was never made.
What remains, in the newly published text, is the quality of Moravia’s writing, his taste for imagery, the sophisticated visual language of an intellectual who loves cinema. However, the profound sense of the original relationship between literature and industrial modernity is lost.
Throughout the second half of the 20th century, a large part of contemporary intellectuality missed this challenge, with the exception of Vittorini, Sinisgalli, Sereni, the “Olivettians” (Zorzi, Ottieri and Volponi, to name a few) and the contributors to the aforementioned company magazines. Giuseppe Lupo himself documented its tensions and downfalls in an outstanding essay, “Misunderstood modernity – A counter-history of Italian industry” (Marsilio, 2023).
However, the question of the relationship between literature and modernity remains relevant. It is crucial to develop a new and improved representation of industry and labour at a time when digital technologies and environmental and social sustainability are transforming products, production systems, trade and consumption. The aim is to present the company as not only an economic actor, but also a social, cultural and civil one.
This is an essential challenge. It concerns businesses, which must learn to be increasingly “open” and “connected” — the two terms that characterise the Confindustria Technical Group for Culture’s projects — and thus speak with sincerity and transparency to all stakeholders. This allows them to create economic value by leveraging the general values and interests of the communities they serve.
However, it is also a challenge that engages with cultural, communication and educational environments, involving writers, artists, film and theatre directors, photographers, journalists, TV writers, architects, designers and experts in the digital world and artificial intelligence. With an awareness that doing business means engaging with culture. Cultural enterprise, in all its creative forms, must ultimately recognise an underlying characteristic of Italy: despite the new technological and competitive environment, it remains a major industrial country.