A story brimming with humanity from a time when industry was different

Working in a factory and living in that factory, with a dream in mind that then shatters into a thousand pieces. Because doing business, and working in a company, can also involve this. Reaching a point where dreams do not become projects and, even when they do, they fail or in any case become something else. And yet, even remembering failures, or changes of direction, helps us to keep the past in mind and thus act more effectively in the present (of course, if we intend to do so). This is why it’s worth reading ‘L’ultimo operaio. Canto finale della grande fabbrica’ (The last worker. The final song of the great factory), a book of around a hundred pages or so written by Niccolò Zancan.
Part literary reportage, part collection of memories recorded in the form of short stories and almost poems, Zancan’s latest literary work recounts the demise of a factory (the Fiat Mirafiori plant in Turin) through the voices of the last workers who worked there. The book is a collection of short pieces, often consisting of sentences of just a few words. They bring to light the names of the many people who spent their lives in the factory of yesteryear, recounting what it was like to work there and how they lived outside those walls.
Zancan has a knack for writing a scathing chronicle – as it has been described – which becomes history but reads like a novel (were it not all true), a tale woven from mysteries, fascinations, mist and cold, a sense of pride in belonging, handcrafted technologies, and then bewilderment and disappointment, of fragments of lives both inside and outside the vast factory and, of course, of dreams. At one point it reads: ‘This place is huge. Twenty kilometres of railway tracks. Thirty kilometres of underground tunnels. It was the biggest factory in Europe. You’d set off from here, and you could end up anywhere. We used to have our own internal roads, special addresses within the “City of Fiat”, secret routes that only we knew about.’ The factory was the heritage of those who worked there. That factory, which no longer exists but has left its mark almost everywhere, has been replaced by other factories that are perhaps more technologically advanced, high-tech (as we say today), places where production goes hand in hand with research, and both with marketing and communication. And let’s not forget, of course, Artificial Intelligence, which for many is the new ‘model worker’. Factories that embody a culture of manufacturing that differs from that of the past (albeit the recent past).
Readers of Niccolò Zancan’s writings thus find themselves, on the one hand, retracing the history of a workforce made up of women and men who will soon be no more (but who, in turn, contributed to the development of Italy’s great automotive industry); on the other hand, however, they gain a different perspective on the origins of today’s factories and today’s industrial world.
Described as being halfway between a novel and a historical and anthropological essay, Zancan’s book deserves to be read with great attention right to the end. This is to discover that, whilst that kind of factory no longer exists (‘We are the last of the workers’, as we read in the penultimate chapter), there must still be a future (‘My future, I’ve thought about it…’, as we read on the final page).

L’ultimo operaio. Canto finale della grande fabbrica
Niccolò Zancan
Einaudi, 2026