The Piccolo Teatro and Pirelli: A Historic Bond Between Culture and Community, in Milan and Around the World
The Piccolo Teatro della Città di Milano first opened its doors on 14 May 1947, at number 2 in Via Rovello. It was set up by Giorgio Strehler, Paolo Grassi and Nina Vinchi, with the support of the City of Milan, and presented itself as a municipal theatre “for everyone” with the aim of offering shows to the broadest possible audience. The project found open arms in the Pirelli family and company. “Even workers do not live on bread alone” was the headline of a short article in 1947 in the company Notiziario – a publication edited by the Group’s workers just after the war – which continued like this: “if we are to soothe the minds of workers […] we need to bring them closer to art, to plain, life-giving art […] A project to achieve this has recently been launched under the mayor of Milan, and is already up and running. A low-cost season ticket is all it takes to access this theatre (and our Cultural Centre itself has joined up).” Right from the outset, the Piccolo did indeed adopt a policy of facilitations for cultural associations and companies, in order to encourage “popular” participation. Pirelli had just opened its Centro Culturale, or Cultural Centre, a company club run by Silvestro Severgnini, a friend of Paolo Grassi, which offered workers events and activities in the fields of music, theatre, figurative arts, cinema and literature. On 30 May 1947, Maxim Gorky’s The Lower Depths, the first show ever put on for Pirelli workers by the Cultural Centre, was staged at the Piccolo Teatro. This is how the event was hailed in the Notiziario: “Workers of all categories and their families, from the most senior managers, in the person of Dottor Alberto Pirelli and a family member of his, to the youngest of our worker friends, a student at the company school, who brought his mother to the theatre, all without any distinction of places, all mixed together, to watch one of the most humanely sympathetic works by the great genius of Russian theatre.” In the following years, the partnership between the Piccolo Teatro and Pirelli was flanked by ties with other cultural institutions in Milan, such as La Scala, the Pomeriggi Musicali and the Teatro del Popolo. As the years went by, the Cultural Centre had more and more to offer: in 1952 it brought 12,495 admissions to the opera and concert season in Milan, becoming “a notable presence in the city’s culture due to its size” (Pirelli magazine, “La fabbrica è aperta ai movimenti della cultura“ – “The factory is open to the latest in culture”) and, from 1960, it acquired a prestigious space of its own: the auditorium inside the Pirelli Tower. The Piccolo and Pirelli still work together on common cultural projects. Two examples of these are the launch in 2012 of Settimo. La fabbrica e il lavoro, a show directed by Serena Sinigaglia, based on hundreds of interviews with workers, technicians and engineers at the Pirelli factory in Settimo Torinese and, more recently, the celebrations of the 150th anniversary of the Pirelli Group, brought to the stage of the Piccolo, a theatre with which it has intertwined its history for more than seventy years.
The Piccolo Teatro della Città di Milano first opened its doors on 14 May 1947, at number 2 in Via Rovello. It was set up by Giorgio Strehler, Paolo Grassi and Nina Vinchi, with the support of the City of Milan, and presented itself as a municipal theatre “for everyone” with the aim of offering shows to the broadest possible audience. The project found open arms in the Pirelli family and company. “Even workers do not live on bread alone” was the headline of a short article in 1947 in the company Notiziario – a publication edited by the Group’s workers just after the war – which continued like this: “if we are to soothe the minds of workers […] we need to bring them closer to art, to plain, life-giving art […] A project to achieve this has recently been launched under the mayor of Milan, and is already up and running. A low-cost season ticket is all it takes to access this theatre (and our Cultural Centre itself has joined up).” Right from the outset, the Piccolo did indeed adopt a policy of facilitations for cultural associations and companies, in order to encourage “popular” participation. Pirelli had just opened its Centro Culturale, or Cultural Centre, a company club run by Silvestro Severgnini, a friend of Paolo Grassi, which offered workers events and activities in the fields of music, theatre, figurative arts, cinema and literature. On 30 May 1947, Maxim Gorky’s The Lower Depths, the first show ever put on for Pirelli workers by the Cultural Centre, was staged at the Piccolo Teatro. This is how the event was hailed in the Notiziario: “Workers of all categories and their families, from the most senior managers, in the person of Dottor Alberto Pirelli and a family member of his, to the youngest of our worker friends, a student at the company school, who brought his mother to the theatre, all without any distinction of places, all mixed together, to watch one of the most humanely sympathetic works by the great genius of Russian theatre.” In the following years, the partnership between the Piccolo Teatro and Pirelli was flanked by ties with other cultural institutions in Milan, such as La Scala, the Pomeriggi Musicali and the Teatro del Popolo. As the years went by, the Cultural Centre had more and more to offer: in 1952 it brought 12,495 admissions to the opera and concert season in Milan, becoming “a notable presence in the city’s culture due to its size” (Pirelli magazine, “La fabbrica è aperta ai movimenti della cultura“ – “The factory is open to the latest in culture”) and, from 1960, it acquired a prestigious space of its own: the auditorium inside the Pirelli Tower. The Piccolo and Pirelli still work together on common cultural projects. Two examples of these are the launch in 2012 of Settimo. La fabbrica e il lavoro, a show directed by Serena Sinigaglia, based on hundreds of interviews with workers, technicians and engineers at the Pirelli factory in Settimo Torinese and, more recently, the celebrations of the 150th anniversary of the Pirelli Group, brought to the stage of the Piccolo, a theatre with which it has intertwined its history for more than seventy years.
