“It is our duty to leave our younger generations with a nation in which it is still possible to have faith in the future.” This is the message with which chairman Marco Tronchetti Provera opened the conference Idee Italiane, an observatory of the status of Italian culture which, this year, focused on Italian architecture in search of an identity.

As Vittorio Gregotti said, “Today, quantity in construction is taking precedence over quality. […] Rules no longer apply. […] A population of impatient barbarians looking for modernity are creating architecture that is made solely of objects of design, enlarged and placed on the ground.” This worry of Gregotti’s has, in some way, anticipated the closing remarks of Umberto Eco, when he said, “The Idee Italiane observatory should, along side the task of actually observing, also have the goal of critiquing and promotion.”

Promotion, first and foremost, of the conservation of the pillars of Italian culture – the subjunctive tense, the semi-colon, the constitution, and the study of history are the examples Umberto Eco gave, quoting Massimo Cacciari. Being conservationists today can be revolutionary, because “only through conservation may we march towards the future”. As Antonio Calabrò, the director of the Foundation, reminds us, Eco, the writer and semiologist, became a part of Pirelli history many years ago when he first published his “Fenomenologia di Mike Bongiorno” in Rivista Pirelli, which was edited by the poet Vittorio Sereni. Rivisti Pirelli has been conserved in its entirety in the Foundation’s historical archive and is also available online. Speakers at the conference also included Sandro Bondi, Italy’s minister of Cultural Heritage, and former Democratic Party leader Walter Veltroni. Related links (in Italian) All’ Auditorium Pirelli Se l’ architettura insegue lo choc Oggi solo i conservatori sono rivoluzionari

To assess the state of Italian culture, creativity and ability to innovate by way of a permanent observatory, this is the goal of the conference Idee Italiane, which was promoted by the Foundation for the Italian Institute of the Humanities and by the Corriere della Sera Foundation, with the support of the Cariplo Foundation and the Pirelli Foundation.

Due to become an annual event, the conference, held in Milan on 15-16 October at the Pirelli HQ auditorium, will feature key figures from the realms of culture and the sciences in order to discuss issues of Italian culture and its outlook for the future. The focus of the first edition of Idee Italiane is architecture.

After greetings by Letizia Moratti, Marco Tronchetti Provera and Giuseppe Guzzetti and the opening remarks of Gae Aulenti, Aldo Schiavone and Piergaetano Marchetti, others speaking at the event include Guido Martinotti, Stefano Rodotà, Pupi Avati, Gianrico Carofiglio, Marc Fumaroli and Vittorio Gregotti, with closing remarks by Umberto Eco.

Rome mayor, Giovanni Alemanno, on official visit in China for “Rome Week” at the World Expo, will be visiting the exhibit “Disegno e Design. Brevetti e creatività italiani” at Tongji University, Shanghai. Organised by Fondazione Valore Italia for the permanent Made in Italy exhibition, the exhibit was moved to Shanghai in July after the great reception it had received in Rome.  Dedicated entirely to patents that have left their mark on Italian industrial design, the exhibit seeks to promote awareness of the significant wealth of creativity that characterises Italian manufacturing.

The Pirelli Group and the Pirelli Foundation are represented with a number of products that testify to the longstanding focus that the company has placed on both the aesthetics and functionality of its products. These include Gatto Meo and the monkey Zizì, stuffed animals designed by Bruno Munari and patented in the 1950s.

But the exhibit also features more recent Pirelli patents, such as the motorcycle tyre Angel and its innovative tread pattern, the famous Discus router by Pirelli Broadband Solutions, the Angel and Icon shoes by Pzero, and the wonderfully colourful rubber boots. All of these are products that, in line with the best Italian manufacturing tradition, unite industrial innovation and design.

For more information, visit www.disegnoedesign.it

Energy and Movement. This is the theme for the event promoted by the Lombardy Superintendent of Archives to which the Pirelli Foundation was invited to attend as part of the European Heritage Days.

The event was an opportunity to meet with the historical archivists of companies that have operated in the energy and motor vehicle industries, including Alfa Romeo, Breda, Edison, Ercole Marelli, Pirelli, Magneti Marelli, Same Deutz, and Roberto Zabban Fotografia Industriale, and with business people who deal with the history and culture of these companies on a daily basis, acting as custodians of the souls of these businesses, providing precious images that tell the story of their development and evolution.

Pirelli’s story cannot be told without mentioning motorsports, particularly in light of its imminent return to Formula 1 and the sole tyre manufacturer. This is why the Pirelli Foundation, in conjunction with “Energia e Movimento”, will be presenting the content and activities of its historical archives, with a particular emphasis on the company’s experience in the world car and motorcycle racing – a century of victories with the most prestigious Italian and international manufacturers, from Ferrari to Maserati, Lotus to Brabham, and with drivers who have written the history books, such as Fangio, Piquet and Schumacher.

A hundred years of competitions and victories, with Pirelli racing on the world’s most challenging tracks since 1913 and which have laid the groundwork for the company’s return to the Formula 1.

Energia e movimento. Gli archivi d’impresa si fanno conoscere
27 September 2010 – 3:00 to 6:00pm
Corso Magenta 24, Milan (Italy)

Istanbul. A photo exhibit on display an the Ciragan Palace in Istanbul celebrates the 50th anniversary of Türk Pirelli. The fruits of a partnership with the Pirelli Foundation’s Historical Archive, this collection of images tells the story of the company and its technological evolution since it landed on the banks of the Bosphorus in 1960.

It was on 26 April of that year, in Izmit (Turkey), that construction work began on the factory that was to expand production of Cinturato, the tyre that was gradually conquering markets around the world.

In a few short years, the Turkish facilities were to become one of Pirelli’s main plants for the production of car, truck and motorsport tyres. And it was the motorsport segment that brought the facilities to the attention of the media. Indeed, in conjunction with the company’s fiftieth anniversary, the “factory of champions” at the Izmit manufacturing hub was inaugurated. These facilities are where the group will be manufacturing the tyres that are to be used in Formula 1 for the 2011-2013 seasons. Guests at the inauguration of the exhibit included local authorities and proponents of Turkish industry and culture, such as the director Ferzan Ozpetek and the singer Sezen Aksu.

12 September 2010.

One cannot speak of the factory, of industry in general, without speaking of its main protagonists – workers, engineers, managers, researchers. People who, in their very faces, recount the culture of machinery. A culture that changes over time, but which maintains its sense of community.

The factory has a soul which we have sought to capture in the faces of its protagonists. Expressions of different lifestyles and different relationships.
Inaugurated on 12 September, the photography exhibit “Workers” features seventy photos that tell of Pirelli’s industrial adventure – its history and its future – through the men and women who dedicated their knowledge, their energy and their skill to the company each and every day. And many of these men and women have attended the event itself. They have seen themselves in a shot taken at work, and some were moved to discover an unfamiliar look or expression. Photos that tell the stories of people and their lives. Some have hand that are still dirty with grease; others with eyes that show the fatigue of a life spent in the factory; still others smile or shed a tear. But they are all proud, their faces showing the pride of a job well done.
Also in attendance were Antonello Ghisaura, councillor responsible for Sports and Culture for the City of Settimo Torino, and representatives of Pirelli’s senior management, including Alberto Pirelli, Gustavo Bracco, Giovanni Pomati and Antonio Calabrò.

“Workers”, la storia e il futuro della Pirelli a Settimo Torinese nel volto dei suoi protagonisti.
promoted by the Pirelli Foundation
Photos by Carlo Furgeri Gilbert
10 September to 10 October 2010
Giardinera, via Italia, 90bis, Settimo Torinese.

Music returns to the factory. More than four hundred people attended the concert of I Fiati di Torino promoted by the Pirelli Foundation within the scope of the MiTo exhibit – an audience that gave life back, for one evening, to the factory in Via Torino (Settimo Torinese), which is being closed down.

But it was far from a requiem. The music of Mozart, Rossini, Beethoven, Bach, Berio, Gabrieli, Saglietti and Stravinsky served as a salute to a factory that is being retired after 56 years of production, to be replaced by new, technologically advanced facilities, which are already under construction just five kilometres away. But the factory is not made only of metal and machines that can be moved or replaced. “The factory is made of people at work. The rapid, skilful movement of their hands.

The motions of the machines. The factory is rhythm. Voices and sounds. All of which give the factory a music all its own. The industry has its own culture, one which can – indeed, must – be found in the buildings of the industry,” said Antonio Calabrò, director of the Pirelli Foundation and Director of Corporate Culture for Pirelli. The audience included a great many current and former Pirelli employees, as well as the mayor of Settimo Torinese, Aldo Corgiat, and Pirelli senior management.

Egidio Pellegrin, Quintilio Di Antonio, Severino Scorzon, retired Pirelli employees, spent forty years of their lives inside the gates at Via Torino. They are filled with emotion when that place of hard work and sweat transforms, for just one night, in the evocative backdrop for a concert of brass instruments, because these are the instruments that best evoke the image of the metal used to make the factory’s machinery. It is a harmonious interplay, one that points to what work can be, must seek to be, even when harmony is difficult to achieve. It is a good example of contemporary corporate culture.

There is a European tradition uniting music and the workplace. In Vienna at the turn of the century with concerts for workers – classical music for a new audience, different from the traditional bourgeois concert goer, and compositions contemporary to those times. As well as in Italy in the 60s and 70s, with musicians such as Luigi Nono, Claudio Abbado and Maurizio Pollini – different sensitivities and different experiences in order to “brighten up the factory”.

The musicians took the stage at 7:00pm. Forming the backdrop for the ensemble were pallets full of tyres, which helped with the acoustics of the space. The music of Mozart’s The Magic Flute and a fugue by Bach seemed, for a moment, to come from the factory itself.