MuseoCity 2017: “Workers leaving the Pirelli Factory” by Luca Comerio

With the first edition of MuseoCity, the multi-venue event that the City of Milan puts on each year in various places around town to highlight its cultural significance, the Pirelli Foundation had the opportunity to show the public Workers Leaving the Pirelli Factory in Via Ponte Seveso, the gigantic group portrait that the photographer Luca Comerio took in 1905, pointing his lens at the thousands of workers gathered together outside the factory. The factory had been opened in 1873, but was destined to be destroyed in the 1943 bombing raids, before rising up in 1960 in the form of the Pirelli Tower.

The photograph – preserved at the Pirelli Foundation in its original 2.5 x 1.5-metre enlargement – had been commissioned from Comerio for display at the Pirelli stand at the Milan International World’s Fair in 1906. It paid tribute to the driving force behind the company in those early years of the twentieth century, so full of new ideas and inventions. A hundred and ten years before the Tree of Life at Expo 2015 in Milan.