Based on the studies of the engineer Luigi Emanueli and patented in 1951, the Cinturato established itself on the international market in the 1960s as an authentic icon of the economic boom and of Italy on the move. The success of Pirelli’s first radial tyre was also hailed in the 1950s and 1960s by the great advertising campaigns that the company entrusted to the creative minds of famous designers such as Ezio Bonini, Riccardo Manzi, Alessandro Mendini, Pino Tovaglia, and Bob Noorda.

Born in Holland in 1927, Noorda became the art director of the Pirelli Group in 1961. His graphic style was unadorned, making the communication clear and immediate, as we see in the 1959 poster in which the Pirelli Cinturato consists of just three elements: a stylised drawing of the tyre, the logo, and the name of the product. “With Eyes Closed“(1961), for another Cinturato, was the most iconic advertising campaign by Riccardo Manzi. In the advertisement, the driver’s eyes are obscured by a tyre that prevents him from seeing the road, and only the use of Pirelli tyres means that he is perfectly safe. The style is humorous and caricatural, and the touch is rapid and instinctive: all traits that make it instantly recognisable as his work.

In 1966 Arrigo Castellani, who was the head of the Pirelli Advertising Department at the time, and the graphic designer Pino Tovaglia created an advertising campaign under the slogan “A journey on the safe side – Pirelli Cinturato”: a sort of experiment based on the interaction between word games and images. In 1968, Pino Tovaglia again put his name to a new advertising campaign, which focused on the popularity of the Cinturato abroad: a series of colour plates in which the dominant motif is that of the stylised flags of various countries, with a headline in each language stating that “also in France [or in Britain, Ireland, Holland or in the other countries where the tyre had become established] it is called Cinturato”.

By this time the Pirelli Cinturato had become international, and it was not just graphic artists and designers who were telling the world about it. Advertising campaigns were also commissioned over the years from great photographers such as Ugo Mulas, or entrusted to film and to exceptional endorsers such as the driver Juan Manuel Fangio, who starred in a series of Carosello television commercials produced by Gamma Film. Because the Pirelli Cinturato “really is different from the others. Extraordinario!”

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“The new Pirelli Cinturato for the new Camaro” was the headline on the 1967 press release that announced the historic arrival of the Cinturato in the United States. To equip what was seen as the great rival of the Ford Mustang in America, Pirelli technicians worked on new structures and on a new tread that were different from the “European” Cinturato: “… since this is an American car, a tread with a longitudinal pattern has been chosen, because as well as ensuring maximum rolling speed and a quiet ride, it also has the greatest resistance over extended mileage, thanks to its regular wear. The structure, both of the casing and of the belt, is particularly robust so as to cope with the great power of the Camaro engine. This ensures a smooth ride and a sporty feel when driving, which is particularly appreciated by European drivers”. This led to the Cinturato CN72, with a complex design based on a blossoming of longitudinal and transversal blocks.

In the meantime, the upward segmentation of the automotive market in Europe in the mid-1960s led to the introduction of the Cinturato S and the Cinturato HS, which in 1967 started to adopt the new CN72 design, which offered a more comfortable and silent ride. The CN72 was fitted on all Ferrari cars and on the Maserati 4000 and 5000, and later on the Lamborghini 350 GT, 400 GT, and Miura.

While the Cinturato CN72 continued to be used for standard-profile sizes, the availability of low-profile sizes increased with the addition of the Series 60 and Series 70. The CN12 tread pattern was designed for the Series 60 and was used on cars such as the Lamborghini Miura P400, Jarama and Urraco, and on the Maserati Bora.

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At the dawn of the 1970s the Pirelli Cinturato took the world automotive market by storm. It was for the Cinturato to earn the same name that had first been given to Pirelli Stella Bianca tyres and then to the Stelvio: “the Victory Tyre”. And indeed it did earn the title, in a new motor-racing sport for normal production cars in extreme conditions, which needed road tyres that could tackle asphalt and dirt tracks, stones and ice: rallying.

Pirelli triumphed in international rallies with its CN36 for summer use and MS35 for the winter, on the Fulvia HF, Fiat 124 Abarth, BMW, and Saab. The MS35, in particular, brought a decisive leap towards the development of a new range: Pirelli Winter tyres. The technological impact of rallying on the standard product was almost immediate, and the Cinturato CN54 was launched in 1972. The press at the time pointed out that “this tyre has been subjected to the toughest tests, in the harshest conditions, demonstrating its exceptional qualities in terms of mileage, road holding on both dry and wet roads, impact resistance, strain, and prolonged speed. It has passed the rallying test and is now available for the main cars now in circulation.”

But then, towards 1973, a new challenge appeared on the horizon in the world of rallying – one that would lead to a new revolution in tyres. The car was the Stratos and Lancia intended to use it in rally racing. The problem was that the Stratos was so powerful that even the most effective traditional radials were unable to hold the road: a new invention was needed. Once again, it was Pirelli that came up with the answer for Lancia, in the form of an ultra-low-profile tyre that took the ratio between the sidewall height and the tread width down to 50%, which had already gone down to 70% with the CN72.

It was a stroke of genius, and one worthy of being honoured in the name of the new tyre: the Cinturato P7, in which the “belt” construction system was a matter of course, with the name written in ever-smaller characters. The new challenges shifted towards the tread patterns and geometries: the P7 was the first step for the new generation of radial-ply tyres.
Today all tyres are radial ply, but the original flair for creating a product that offers high performance out on the track has certainly not been lost: the Pirelli P Zero would not exist today if, seventy years ago, pioneering minds had not tried to imagine a solid casing with a radial structure, tightened by non-deformable belts to ensure a regular square contact area. To win on road and track.

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The world of car collecting is going through a period of great vitality: never have there been so many exhibition fairs, trade publications and websites, bringing together enthusiasts from the world over, promoting interaction and the sharing of knowledge.  The restoration of vintage vehicles is becoming increasingly like the restoration of works of art, with meticulous attention being paid to reproducing every last detail to make them just as they were originally. Vintage cars have always been a difficult area to work in as regards their tyres: even if the tyre remains intact, after some decades it may no longer meet the safety standards the car will need for its new life on the road. The Pirelli Collezione range of tyres is based on one fundamental aspect, which is that the Historical Archive of the Pirelli Foundation contains a complete technical inventory, making it possible to reproduce these tyres in full compliance with today’s construction and quality standards for road use.

Pirelli engineers thus have access to the original factory specifications, the types of materials used, and the patterns of the original moulds, as well as all the original pictures and sales documentation, from advertisements to catalogues and price lists. This legacy is not only technological but also cultural, and it has been made possible by more than a century of close collaboration between Pirelli and the most important car manufacturers around the world. For Pirelli engineers, the challenge has been to create tyres designed for levels of performance that were unthinkable back then, in modern factories using technologically advanced systems, requiring an extremely careful balance between the past and the production standards of Industry 4.0. It has required a long testing process on prototypes both indoors and, especially, out on the track, using the original vehicles for which the final product is designed. The cars concerned have been made available by collectors and enthusiasts, making it possible to carry out a global, integrated study on different vehicles.

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Leonardo, son of Piero da Vinci, was born on 15 April 1452. Everything has been said and written about the Tuscan genius, every last detail of every work of his has been minutely studied. Nevertheless, to celebrate such an important anniversary, we would like to offer our own contribution to Leonardo’s story – one with unexpected links to the history of Pirelli. The fifteenth-century Bicocca degli Arcimboldi villa on the Viale Sarca in Milan, now the Pirelli Group’s official reception venue, has preserved traces – albeit indirect – of Leonardo’s passage. In 1917-18, as part of the Group’s industrial expansion in the north-eastern area of the city, the company purchased the Bicocca degli Arcimboldi, on which construction work was started in the second half of the fifteenth century by the aristocratic Milanese family of the same name. The expansion of the Pirelli area had been going since 1906 and was destined to end in the mid-twentieth century when the total area reached almost a million square metres.

The plot of land purchased from the estate of Count Sormani in the immediate post-war period also included the “country villa”, which had been built in the late medieval style of Lombardy. The interior is a succession of frescoed rooms, each with its own theme: the atrium decorated with the sun of fifteenth-century Po Valley art, the clasped hands and the motto “Always in God” in the central vestibule, the Hall of Duty reserved for important personalities, and the enchanting Bramantesque Ladies’ Hall. And then, in the northwest corner, the Hall of Knots, the personal chamber of the judge-archbishop Guidantonio Arcimboldi, frescoed with a recurring motif: a red cord that runs low down on the white wall, and then turns into twelve small knots that, in turn, create another twenty-four larger ones. And it does so three times, in an asymmetrical position on each door, all the way up to the ceiling, creating a geometric arabesque motif with perfect clarity of line. The knot, the number twelve, the Mudéjar arabesque, and the geometric composition: everything points to Leonardo da Vinci and his “code”. We cannot by any means say that those red lines were drawn by the master himself, but the anonymous decorator of the Bicocca, who presumably worked in the last decade of the fifteenth century, undoubtedly drew on the world of symbols of Leonardo, who was already well established in Milan at the time.

Preserving and promoting this wonderful artistic heritage also means preserving Leonardo’s lessons in today’s world, handing on his humanistic lesson to the future, with all his genius and enterprise.

The first Milano-Sanremo, the most classic cycling race of all time, was held on 14 April 1907. The brainchild of two journalists, Tullo Morgagni and Armando Cougnet, with the blessing of Eugenio Costamagna, the editor of the Gazzetta dello Sport, the 286 km race started from the Osteria Conca Fallata on the Naviglio Pavese, with the finish line in Via Roma in Sanremo, the “City of Flowers”, by way of the Passo del Turchino. As was often the case back then, it immediately became a duel between the French and the Italians. Lucien Petit-Breton came from beyond the Alps, but he had been hired by the Bianchi company in Italy for the occasion: born Lucien Georges Mazan, he had emigrated to Argentina but then returned to his homeland, where he was nicknamed the “Little Breton” because of his diminutive stature.

Another Frenchman was Gustave Garrigou, who competed in the Peugeot jersey at the time and who, a few years later, would ride to victory in the Tour de France. The Italian team relied on Giovanni Gerbi, known as the “Red Devil”. Born in Asti, he had moved to Milan where he worked as a baker’s boy. He owed his nickname to the red sweater he always wore, as well as to his not exactly meek nature. Years later, he gained immortality in a song by Paolo Conte. Luigi Ganna, from Induno Olona near Varese, finished fourth in the first edition of the Classicissima, going on to win the following year, in 1908, thus entering the history books of cycling. The winner of the first Milano-Sanremo was Petit-Breton, who reached the finish line in 11 hours and 4 minutes. It was the beginning of an immense chapter in the history of cycling. Just a few years later, Costante Girardengo, the “Campionissimo”, came onto the scene and for about a decade only the Italian flag would go up at the Milano-Sanremo. By its side, of course, fluttered the yellow and red flag with the Long P of Pirelli.

The second course put on by Fondazione Pirelli Educational to assist teachers in improving their distance learning activities uses audio, video, films, and readings to illustrate the most important innovations introduced by Pirelli in the world of science and technology, with a look at digital robotics and the transformation of production processes.

The content, designed for lower secondary school students, follows the evolution of innovation that has swept through the products and processes of the major industrial concern that is Pirelli. It ranges from the founding of the company in 1872 through to the very latest tyres, which are equipped with a sensor to make them “smart”, and to the most modern production systems of Industry 4.0. The course clearly illustrates the powerful bond that unites the world of scientific and technical innovation and humanistic culture – and music in particular.

The school subjects involved in this course are Science, Technology, and Music, and teachers can choose whether to make use of all the elements in the course or only one or more of them, to fit their course times and study plans.

The content is structured as follows:

Robots and Innovation at Pirelli

A video presentation that tells the story of the main technological innovations introduced by Pirelli in almost 150 years of history. From Ercole, the company’s first car tyre in 1901, to the “smart” tyre of today.

The Art of Making Tyres

A video that examines the role of creativity in different areas – an extract from the meeting with students entitled Bach: Music and Science in the Factory organised in 2019 in the Pirelli auditorium in Milan, and a presentation of the Pirelli Cyber Car tyre.

Analysis

Materials for an in-depth examination of robotics and coding. They include videos that explain how coding works and how a robot moves, with recommended reading and an online programming course.

Il Canto della Fabbrica

Il Canto della Fabbrica, a composition inspired by the rhythms and sounds of the Pirelli Industrial Centre in Settimo Torinese, and performed in the factory itself in 2017 by the Orchestra da Camera Italiana conducted by Maestro Salvatore Accardo, gave insight into the link between manufacturing and culture.

Il Canto della Fabbrica 

A site devoted to the project with Maestro Salvatore Accardo and Maestro Francesco Fiore in the “factory in the cherry orchard”.

VISIT TO THE FOUNDATION

The course ends with the fondazionepirelliexperience virtual tour, a visit to the Pirelli Foundation.

The young people are invited to search the different rooms: the video on Innovation with the 8 keywords at the entrance to the Foundation, the Scientific and Technical Library, with over 16,000 volumes, and Scientific Research by Renato Guttuso, which is a symbol of Pirelli’s long history of research and development, together with its “twin” mosaic.

If you would like to receive full information or have any further requirements, please write to scuole@fondazionepirelli.org

An important voice in the dialogue between scientific and humanistic culture in the pages of Pirelli magazine is that of the artists whose works, together with those of photographers, accompanied the texts of poets, writers, scientists, architects, economists, and journalists, exploring the most diverse subjects in the field of human knowledge. One of the first artists to work with the magazine, as well as on the company’s advertising communication, was Fulvio Bianconi. Born in Padua in 1915, he moved to Milan in the 1930s. Here, thanks to his encounter with Cesare Zavattini, a key figure for artists and intellectuals who had “emigrated” to Milan, he began working as a graphic designer and illustrator for what were then the leading companies in Milan.

He started working with Pirelli in 1949, probably called in by Leonardo Sinisgalli, the creator and first editor of the magazine, where he created illustrations for articles entitled “The fire fly” and “When you learn to fly” in 1949 and advertisements for Pirelli Sapsa mattresses, as well as for the elastic luggage strap in 1950. After creating pen-and-ink drawings to illustrate “The muse in the wheels”, an article by Giansiro Ferrata on the final of the Gran Premio Pirelli in 1954, and an article written in 1955 by Armando Stefani on the history of balls, in the second half of the 1950s Fulvio Bianconi made his mark with a new genre in the magazine – that of “factory visits”. Along the lines of the examples that had already appeared in Civiltà delle macchine, the bimonthly magazine of Finmeccanica edited by Sinisgalli from early 1956, a series of articles devoted to the factory and industrial production also began to appear in Pirelli. With the idea of introducing the general public to the processes involved in manufacturing objects, the various stages of production were taken from life by graphic artists and painters, whose drawings were used to illustrate and embellish popular and educational texts on manufacturing methods. Fulvio Bianconi worked on illustrating the magazine with India ink drawings, and others in bright colours, showing the machines and processes involved in making Pirelli products: tennis balls and electric cables in 1956, tyres, raincoats, toys, pipes, boats and, lastly, in 1959, Lastex yarn.

Recently restored, two previously unpublished drawings by Bianconi, from the series on visits to factory, now enrich the Historical Archive. The drawings are made with ink and coloured chalks and show the production of toys in the Pirelli Rempel collection (1957) and the manufacture of Resivite pipes at the Azienda Articoli Tecnici plant (1958), made during a visit to the factories. In addition to these is a third drawing in tempera, pen and ink, and graphite, made in 1962 to illustrate an article devoted to management training. This was Bianconi’s last assignment for the magazine. In the 1960s, painters in the factory again came to the fore in Pirelli magazine with great new artists: the painters Ernesto Treccani’s and Giancarlo Cazzaniga’s painted images and words told of their personal experiences in the factory.

The interwoven relationship between training, personal growth and professional development is explored in a recently-discussed thesis

Learning alone in order to be able to grow better. It’s not a question of isolation, but rather the ability to assimilate knowledge. Including – and indeed, above all – after school education is over. It’s a matter of focus, technique, and being open to others. An all-round cultural matter, which is also becoming increasingly apparent within companies every day. These are the themes upon which Giuseppina Cuccurullo has based her thesis, “Agile Self. Learning in azienda. Pratiche di formazione e sviluppo per promuovere l’autosviluppo in azienda (Agile Self. In-company learning. Training and development practices for promoting self-development within a company, discussed at the “Riccardo Massa” Department of Humanities for Training, Master’s Degree Course in Training and Development of Human Resources at the University of Milano-Bicocca.

The exploration begins with the observation that “in a fluent and constantly evolving market, the individual finds him or herself forced to become the owner of their own learning process, ‘from outside to inside the company’ (i.e. no longer only during their core job)”. As such, the individual is therefore not only a learning worker, but also an Agile Self–Learner , and therefore, a person who is “able to define his or her own development needs and identify how these can be met in a context which is increasingly rich in stimuli, with companies or organisations created to offer ad hoc services”. This situation encourages both personal and social growth, although this must not only be clearly understood but also carefully managed.

Cuccurullo thus addresses the theme from a theoretical point of view in the first instance – looking at the fundamental aspects of the Agile Self–Learner and training in organisations – and then from a practical point of view, addressing three real-life situations: those of Sisal, Heineken and Docebo. Indeed, the author’s objective is to “explain how organisations are taking steps with regard to training in order to promote self-learning, with the ultimate goal of responding to a need for survival and continuous innovation”.

From all this, she observes that personal learning processes are now essential elements, not only in the growth of the individual, but also in order to strengthen production organisations. In her conclusions, Giuseppina Cuccurullo writes the following: “Agility, and therefore the speed in gathering and manipulating information in order to respond to survival needs in a timely manner, is becoming a key feature in the learning landscape”; but she then goes on to highlight “how thin the boundary is between what people learn outside the company and reuse in their work and what they learn through the development plans established with their respective managers. This boundary, which is as yet undefined, could lead to new rules being established within the context of the psychological contract in the long term, which in turn could define how much of the individual know-how gained outside company time and without the company’s support the company has a right to, and also to what degree the company has the duty to create a temporal space in which the person in question has the right to manage his or her own learning responsibly, with an awareness of how he or she will use it with regard to the goals of the organisation”.

Accordingly, it is conceivable that a new corporate culture could be founded upon the processes and rules of all-round learning.

Agile_Self-Learning_in_Corporate_Environ

Giuseppina Cuccurullo

Thesis, University of Milano-Bicocca, “Riccardo Massa” Department of Humanities for Training, Master’s Degree Course in Training and Development of Human Resources, 2019

Alessandro Perissinotto effectively illustrates a form of storytelling that is globally applicable

Recounting a story. And thus remembering.  And even before this, making yourself known. Sharing. Making your own story, or other stories, available to others. Telling a story in order to bear testament to our existence. And to avoid being alone. Even when it comes to organisations (both those in the social and manufacturing sectors) – which at first sight may seem far removed from the world of storytelling – we find that this remains an important process, not least in order to construct a more complete and comprehensible corporate culture.

The theme of the story in its different forms is important for us all, and the vast theme of storytelling is taking on ever-greater importance. This is precisely why “Raccontare” (Telling a tale) by Alessandro Perissinotto (who teaches storytelling at the University of Turin) is a useful read: it is a book of less than two hundred pages, itself written in the form of a story (although some passages are not easy to read), and is full of both theory and practice – stories which demonstrate how to build an effective narrative and numerous examples drawn from the world of economics and business, art, and from regional sources, crime news reporting and science.

Perissinotto first outlines the theoretical aspects of telling a story – he begins by explaining the complexity of finding a single definition of the word “storytelling”, referring to this as an “umbrella term” – and then goes on to explore the tools that are used to build a good story, before placing storytelling within the context of society and people’s behaviour and looking at the way it explains these. Then, having laid down his theory, the author takes a closer look at storytelling within organisations (and first and foremost in companies), in the way in which a region is described, in crime reporting (as mentioned), and then in theatre and in medicine, as well as touching upon diary writing and the humanities.

In each passage, Perissinotto carefully combines different sources, places and images to provide a balanced panorama of the merits (and also of the risks) associated with the many ways of building a story and making it known. His observations also apply, for example, to organisations, and Perissinotto explains how storytelling can really serve as a valuable tool that enables the nature of these to be better explained, as well as warning that this should be approached with care and caution (to avoid “distorting effects” that could only do damage).

Perissinotto’s story of storytelling really is a good read. And it cautions, above all, against the traps and passing trends into which storytelling can fall (becoming a fashion itself, among other things).

We can’t live without stories. This is the message that the author conveys to the reader. A message which we simply must take on board.

Raccontare. Strategie e tecniche di storytelling (Telling a tale. Storytelling strategies and techniques)

Alessandro Perissinotto

Laterza. 2020