Pirelli was an international company right from the outset, and its first factory abroad was built in Spain in 1902. In the years immediately following, factories were opened in England, and then in Argentina, in Brazil… All the way through to the “Pirelli world” we see today, with 18 factories in 12 countries. And, over the years, also the Group’s visual communication has become increasingly global. The advent of television had an unprecedented accelerating effect on this sector, for through the common medium of television, all Pirelli plants around the world created their own advertising lexicon, which became an integral part of their image. Particularly in the 1980s, all the companies in the Group’s various markets intensified their inventive spirit, and the tyre became the subject of a global tale, adapted to local tastes and inclinations, country by country. Pirelli: Advertising with a Capital P, the book published by the Pirelli Foundation in 2017 to investigate visual communication from the 1970s to the early 2000s, devotes a sizeable section to this phenomenon of television advertising in the recent past, and to the world of Pirelli as shown on the small screen.

It was the British subsidiary, Pirelli Ltd, that stood out in those years for its creativity, with a series of commercials that marked an era. It was also in England, way back in the 1960s, that the Pirelli Calendar had first seen the light, and it was Pirelli Ltd that produced a feature film called  The Tortoise and the Hare, in which the director Hugh Hudson (the Oscar prize winner with Chariots of Fire) filmed a race between a Jaguar and a truck on the Autostrada del Sole in a celebration of the Cinturato. In 1980 the British subsidiary made Pirellibility, a commercial considered to be one of the first experiments in digital animation and then, in 1986, Double Indemnity, a thriller that, with the headline “Gripping Stuff”, made history in English-speaking markets. Another minor masterpiece of television came in 1989: the epic The Day the Earth Stood Still, with the Pirelli P Zero as the star on a Lamborghini Countach Anniversary against the backdrop of the Sassi di Matera.

Italy responded in those years with La base della sicurezza: a little fair-haired boy playing in the middle of the road and a white car racing towards him, braking safely on its Pirelli Serie Larga tyres. No words, no music – the creativity was that of the in-house Centro agency. In the Une sculpture d’avance campaign, launched in France in 1983, the star is a humanoid who moves at high speed in a hyper-technological world thanks to a Pirelli P8 tyre, and The most wanted tyres  was launched in Scandinavia with a girl in red high heels who rashly leaves a Ferrari with Pirelli P7 tyres unattended. These were the years of the Die Beine Ihres Autos campaign in Germany, with short films in which the protagonists move balancing on a tyre as though “on their car’s legs”. From Spain, on the other hand, come the romantic atmospheres of the Reflejos and from Turkey an amusing commercial with a Pirelli P4 with a life of its own. In the world of 1980s television, Brazil was a case apart: in the Que categoria! series of mini-comedies of 1981, famous endorsers like the footballer Sócrates, the actress Kate Lyra, and the racing driver Wilson Fittipaldi enter a tyre shop to buy the “Cinturaço”. And the same South American company came up with Pantera, at the end of the decade, in a race between Diabolik’s black Jaguar and a black panther, whose claws trace out the pattern of the Pirelli P600. Communication styles and visual languages enjoyed total autonomy in these years, and it was only with Sharon Stone in 1993 that all the Pirellis around the world came together in the famous International campaign If you’re going to drive, drive. A great ambassador for a truly “global” communication.

Small Italian businesses against the big ones. The production facilities distributed across the country against the “big fish” and the “elite”. Small factories against multinationals. Anyone who is unfamiliar with the Italian industrial fabric uses these phrases, which are somewhat detached from reality, to try to rewrite industrial policies, as this is how they think within government circles concerning the contents of the “manoeuvre” economic plan to “support businesses”. “A few confused ideas”, would have been the words of Mino Maccari, genius of art and satire from the Fifties.

Why? The plan for “Industry 4.0” has been drastically downsized, although it had encouraged strong investments from thousands of companies to innovate their plants, products and services: the super-depreciation has long gone, the hyper-depreciation extended to 2020 has been reduced to discourage large groups, precisely those with greater investment capacity, the drive towards greater training has disappeared, training that is indispensable to grow and develop the workforce and skills suitable for the digital industry. And also: the contribution to the capitalisation of companies has been abolished, and the tax credit for research and development has been stopped at 2020, thereby making these activities immediately more complicated and limited. There is a mini-IRES (corporate income tax) for companies that invest and recruit, but tailored to mini-companies.

No tax cuts, goodbye to the promised flat tax. There is only a 15% tax for VAT registration number holders with a turnover of up to Euro 65,000 (workshops, small professional practices, individual concerns especially in commerce and small services) and a tax concession, again at 15%, for professors who give private tuition lessons (who knows what this measure has to do with policies for GDP growth…).

Nothing for the development of industry and businesses which are more capable of productivity and competitiveness and therefore of growing the economy, and instead a lot of scatter-gun funding that feels a lot like pre-election favouritism. A far cry from the “manoeuvre” for economic development, which the “yellow and greens” (M5S + Lega) government is proclaiming across Italy and in Brussels.

“A budget law that is disconnected from reality. There is hostility toward businesses”, snaps Carlo Bonomi, chair of Assolombarda, the largest territorial association within the Confindustria industrial federation (6 thousand registered member companies, in Italy’s most economically dynamic and innovative area), during an interview to “La Repubblica” (3 November). Bonomi lists all the errors of the “manoeuvre”, reiterates the absolute opposition of the organisation to the tax amnesty, and he is categorical about the mini-IRES: “As it stands, it is entirely useless”. And, with clear irony: “They can delete it tomorrow. That way, they will save the funds to cover it, simplify the procedures and avoid wasting the paper it is written on.”

Assolombarda has the requisite competence to discuss the relationship between effective taxation and economic growth. It recently submitted a healthy “white paper” on “Tax, businesses and growth”, a 210-page volume packed with data, tables, analyses and proposals. He discussed it in meetings with members of the government and members of parliament from all sides elected in Milan, accompanying the individual proposals with figures and concrete examples of costs and benefits for businesses, the workforce and for Inland Revenue. He spoke to the media about it. To no avail.

Now the instructions of the “manoeuvre” have become clear, which are punitive for companies, especially for medium- to large-sized companies, and with scatter-gun contributions for small and very small businesses. But it is in fact the large companies which are the most innovative, which stimulate research and the dissemination of new technologies, help universities for the most ambitious programmes. And it is to the best, large multinational companies that the dense fabric that ties together different companies refers, regardless of their size, in districts, production supply chains, networks, meta-districts, sophisticated supply chains which also support the penetration of Italian industry in international markets.

Bonomi is right: “There is hostility toward businesses”. And the government’s tax measures, besides having an unacceptable punitive flavour against those companies that even in these difficult years have invested, innovated, conquered new markets, focused their capital and their resources of skills and know-how on economic growth, are likely to have a strongly depressive result: scatter-gun subsidies guarantee a certain subsistence for the weakest businesses but they do not help their development and discourage investments from the more dynamic companies. But without investment, both domestic and international, there can be no development. Except in the imagination of the propaganda-filled proclamations of the government.

“A company is a genuine incubator of social cohesion,” insists Bonomi, in addition to being an engine of growth and employment (real work, not what people are yearning for through subsidies from their “citizenship income”).

Businesses are right to be extremely concerned. Entrepreneurs from Milan and Lombardy, Veneto, Piedmont, Emilia, and Tuscany area saying out loud that they do not entirely agree with government policies, the bad “manoeuvre” which will put a brake on public investment in infrastructure (starting with the High-Speed train plans), tax and illegal building redevelopment amnesties and hostility towards a Europe that is siding with Trump’s USA and Putin’s Russia who are working towards weakening the EU.

They are not the opposition. But a social player with a sense of community. They don’t support a particular party but “Italy and everything that is good for the country”. A responsible government would listen to them. Indeed, if it were responsible.

There have been immediate responses to this bad government, from the economic world. And also long-standing responses. As demonstrated by “Connext”, the latest initiative by Confindustria, which was launched this autumn 2018 and plans a major event for all the 160,000 member companies registered with the organisation specifically in Milan, scheduled to take place on 7th and 8th February 2019.

“There is an economic fabric of great merit that, were it to become well-organised, could accomplish a leap in quality. So, this is an industrial partnership project, one of alliance between companies to innovate, network and grow”, states Antonella Mansi, vice-chair of Confindustria, the soul of the initiative to build development and look together to international markets (interview with “Il Sole24Ore”, 28 October).And also: “Integrating the supply chains in a vertical manner and creating horizontal exchanges of innovation and competence”, liaising also with foreign countries, continental and Mediterranean Europeans (Germany, Morocco) and with worlds (credit, finance, Stock Exchange, services, research centres) which, in the dense fabric of economic relations, keep the most active part of Italy going, the part that enables the country not to sink in the swamps of favouritism, assistance, illegality, pulling favours, subsidies, and unproductive protectionism. The process that Manzi has started up within Confindustria, with the collaboration of Assolombarda, attempts to make way for a competitive and collaborative Italy, one that is inclusive and productive, completely different from the government simplification of “small versus big”, “Italians against multinationals” which we mentioned at the beginning. An Italy that is much more real than the fake news, one to which careful attention should be paid.

“Connext” has already started touring Italy with a road show from Venice to Cagliari and Naples, from Turin to Bari, from Florence to Rome and Catania, and is expected to end up in Milan for the February event. Debates, discussions, research, critical reflections and auto critiques. And a focused attention on four thematic areas, which summarise the essence of the changes under way in our businesses: people, company, city and territory. Antonella Mansi explains: “The people theme is addressed by involving the sectors of life sciences, health, well-being, welfare. The company, the factory, is understood in the expression of innovation, virtual reality, the cloud. The city comprises energy, the environment, urban regeneration, services. The territory is considered the workshop of sustainable development and of the circular economy”.

There is indeed a general thought, behind all this commitment, that goes beyond the traditional boundaries of entrepreneurial representations. There is talk of changes and a more balanced economic development, a “just economy”, what ties together “competitiveness” with “community”. It is a thought that moves in keeping with the times. One that is worth listening to and respecting.

The latest book by an international economist analyses the difficult situation in which we are living and points us towards a way out of it

An awareness of where we are. And of where we are heading. We have told ourselves this on many occasions, but it is worthwhile repeating it. It is a good idea for everyone – citizens, entrepreneurs, managers, workers, employees –, to equip themselves with the tools to understand where we stand and in what direction we are moving. This is not simply a matter of civil conscience, but something much more wide-ranging. Which has many implications. And those who are in charge of businesses should have tools for analysis and knowledge which are if possible even more sophisticated. This is the case of “Sull’orlo del caos. Rimettere a posto la democrazia per crescere” (Edge of Chaos. Why democracy is failing to deliver economic growth, and how to fix it), written by Dambisa Moyo (an economist and essayist, who is interested in macroeconomic ideas and international affairs) which has just been translated into Italian.

The book is not just a vast fresco of the situation in which the world finds itself (on the edge of chaos, precisely), but also a loud cry to find (all) the best ways towards an economic boost and growth for which everyone (citizens and businesses) feels the need, but in whose direction we seem to have lost our way. A generation after the fall of the Berlin Wall – explains Moyo –, the world is once again on the brink of chaos. Protests and revolts are growing in numbers, the author tells us, but it seems that they all have a common feature: the population is asking their governments to do more to improve their lives and to do it quickly. However, she points out straight afterwards, in the present conditions of “anaemic” growth, the political powers that be are not in a position to offer them any solution whatsoever. The increasing inequalities in income and a stagnating economy represent a threat both for the developed world and for the developing nations, and our political leaders can no longer permit themselves to ignore the storm already looming on the horizon.

Moyo then turns her reasoning to the analysis of the history and economic events of recent years by examining in greater depth the concept of growth, and by studying protectionist tendencies, and the evolution of the applications of democracy. In this way she goes on to identify “four headwinds”:  demographics, inequalities, the scarcity of raw materials, and technological innovation. It is from the combination of these factors that the current chaos is being created, as is the difficulty in mastering it.

Yet Moyo’s text does not abandon any positive vision for our future.  Economic growth is essential for global stability – she explains –, but today’s liberal democracies are no longer able to generate it. We should not, however, resign ourselves to embarking upon a course which leads us away from democracy, Moyo affirms, but rather we should radically reform democracy itself.

From all this, Moyo proposes ten reforms. These proposals centre around a transformation of the way in which elections are carried out, change the way in which politicians are judged and ensure that both electors and politicians hold a long-term vision of the future.

The book by Dambisa Moyo should be read with an open mind. Its views cannot always be shared by everyone. But this is not the point. What is much more important is what is contained in just over 200 pages of text: a message of hope about the ability of the world to redeem itself. A message which is valid for everyone.

Sull’orlo del caos. Rimettere a posto la democrazia per crescere (Edge of chaos. Why democracy is failing to deliver economic growth, and how to fix it)

Dambisa Moyo

Egea, 2018

On 15 November at 7 p.m. in the Auditorium of the Pirelli Headquarters in the Bicocca district, the Pirelli Foundation presents an evening devoted entirely to Milan, the capital of Lombardy. This modern, vibrant metropolis preserves traces of its identity as an industrial city in its physical features and in its memory.

The show is produced in collaboration with the Teatro Franco Parenti and the University of Milano-Bicocca. The actors Marina Rocco and Rosario Lisma will take the stage to recite from a number of pages from the historic Pirelli magazine together with excerpts from novels about the city. These will range from Dino Buzzati’s visit to the Pirelli Tower and Alberto Savinio’s description of the “megapterae of Milanese building” to Alda Merini’s poems and Giorgio Scerbanenco’s stories of brutal underworld crimes in 1960s Milan, through to the walls of factories seen as the Great Wall of China by Ottiero Ottieri and Alberto Rollo’s “Milanese education”. The readings by the two actors will be accompanied by the words and reflections of Antonio Calabrò, director of the Pirelli Foundation, Piero Colaprico, a journalist and writer, Giuseppe Lupo, a writer and professor at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, and Pietro Redondi, professor at the University of Milan-Bicocca. This polyphonic dialogue between past and present is illustrated by images from the huge photographic archive of the Pirelli Foundation. A photo reportage made between 1958 and 1961 by Arno Hammacher will show the construction of the M1 metro line in Milan on the big screen of the Pirelli Auditorium, illustrating the construction site and workers on the job viewed from unusual perspectives. There will be works by the great photographers Paolo Monti, Aldo Ballo, and Giancarlo Scalfati showing the construction of the Pirelli Tower, capturing one of the moments of city’s greatest vitality in terms of the economy and design during its rapid post-war boom. And there will be factory interiors and city streets filled with fog and the Vespas and Lambrettas ridden by workers hurrying by on their way to work.

Extracts from the screenplay of Questa è la nostra città – a neo-realist melodrama written by Alberto Moravia in 1947 and now in the Pirelli Historical Archive – will also be read for the first time during the evening, The film, which was never made, was commissioned by Alberto Pirelli for the company’s seventy-fifth anniversary and it was to have been directed by Roberto Rossellini, one of the most distinguished directors of the time. The screenplay tells the story of the Riva family, with three generations of workers at Pirelli.

In the text, Moravia also looks at daily life in the industrial world of Milan through the prism of the Pirelli Bicocca factory in the 1940s: “Here is the Pirelli factory. The workers converge from all sides of the square in front of the main entrance, past the fruit carts and the stalls of the cigarette sellers. A pale autumn sun plays on the square and on the walls of the Pirelli factory. The workers enter in line, going to place their bicycles in the shed, and then away they go, each to their own department.”

05

The history and the meaning of our style in a book

Manufacturing and beauty. Industry and culture. Corporate culture, indeed. With all the necessary precautions; because certainly the art of industry, craftsmanship, manufacturing, production, in short, also involves effort and commitment, risk, the hard will to succeed, determination and perseverance. But, aside from all this, manufacturing well often also means above all to have style and taste. These peculiarities see Italy in the front row of the world, ahead of everyone and imitated by all. It is for this reason that knowing more about the culture of Italian style is a good thing for those who want to understand the success of our country in many production fields better.

This was what Romano Benini (professor of Italian Fashion Industries at La Sapienza University in Rome) has done, writing an essay that covers this topic and sums up one of the thousand-year old strengths of Italianness in the world.

Benini writes with a plain and understandable language, yet which requires focus and caution. “Lo stile italiano” (Italian Style) is the story of what is summed up today as Made in Italy and then begins with the investigation of the meaning of the term “style” and of a term related to it: “taste”. This is where Benini starts to clarify first of all the links between form and content and then between aesthetic styling and ethics of manufacturing, moving on thereafter to clarifying how much Italian success throughout the world, including economic, is based on our ability to maintain a manufacturing culture that manages to combine specifically the exterior with the interior of every product. “The resistance – Benini explains -, that Italy still maintains today to the separation between ethics and aesthetic styling is what makes it attractive in a global system based instead on mass consumption of goods free of any value and intended to produce large amounts of refuse and waste”.

But how did all this come about? The answer is given by Benini throughout the whole book, by retracing – from the Etruscans to the modern day – the fundamental stages of the relationship between Italian style and production; in all its forms: from food to craftsmanship and to manufacturing in all its expressions.

Benini’s “moral” is clear. Ten years after the outbreak of the global economic crisis, Italian style not only came out of the crisis unscathed, but it was the driving factor for the development of various sectors of the Italian economy. Hence an example of a resilient Italy. And the “secret” to its success. Benini then condense into a series of keywords and commandments of the founding elements of the style that characterises us. And he explains: “Italians can shed their difficulties by treasuring their history and their identity, but for this to be possible, policies and interventions are required, that are capable of accommodating, stimulating and supporting the assertion in culture, in society and in the economy of the most significant aspects of Italianness”.

What Romano Benini has written is a beautiful book, in the purest Italian style.

Lo stile italiano. Storia, economia e cultura del Made in Italy (Italian style. The history, economy and culture of Made in Italy)

Romano Benini

Donzelli, 2018

Italy is still a country of emigrants. And yet at the same time it is a country of welcome, including for high-flying students, in our best universities, starting with Milan. These are data about social and economic movements which tell of a country undergoing change.And which bring government policy directly into play, whereby conscious and effective governmental decisions need to be made about a phenomenon which indicates either a long period of crisis or alternatively opportunities for growth and for an improved quality of economic and social development.

Let us examine the data, first of all. The 13th “Report on Italians in the world”, prepared by the CEI Migrantes Foundation and presented in Rome on 24th October last notes that over the past twelve years, from 2006 to 2018, the mobility of Italians has grown from 3.1 million registered with the AIRE (Repertory of Italians resident abroad) to 5.1 million, corresponding to 8.5% of the 60 million residents in Italy. An extremely high figure. Which needs to be examined more carefully, however: just over half are registered as “expatriate”, whereas 39.5% are children of Italian citizens abroad and the others a result of the acquisition of nationality (children of families of Italian origin who obtain a second passport). The numbers certainly show that those registered with the AIRE have grown by 64.7% compared with twelve years ago. And yet the AIRE fails to collate comprehensively the number of Italians abroad, because there are very many people who, having left Italy for study or work reasons, fail to register with it.

Who is leaving? Principally the young, aged between 18 and 34 years old (37.4%) and “young adults” (25%). But over the years there has been an increase in the phenomenon relating to those who are over 50 years old: half of them go to Europe (with an ever-dwindling interest for the United Kingdom, following the ominous choices about Brexit), and another 40% to the USA and Latin America. These are people who are still of working age or active pensioners who, having found themselves on their own, have a tendency to gravitate once more towards the families of their children and grandchildren. Grandparents on the move, if you like. A small proportion are pensioners who decide to go and live where there are lower taxes (Portugal, for example), the cost of living is low and climatic conditions are more favourable for the “third age”.

Of the 243 thousand people newly registered with the AIRE in 2017, more than half, 128 thousand, are those “expatriates”, that is to say the new Italian emigrants. From where are they leaving? From the rich and dynamic Lombardy region, above all, in the case of 21,980. Then, from the Emilia Romagna region (12,912) and from the Veneto region, the land of factories (11,132). A phenomenon which calls for further reflection: people are leaving precisely from areas which are economically prosperous, with solid job opportunities and a robust tissue of high-quality universities and multinational businesses. It is the so-called “brain drain”. Well-educated, well-prepared, entrepreneurial young people, who prefer the international pathways in their search for better job and lifestyle opportunities, and more welcoming surroundings compared with Italian universities (where a little too much “family influence” still applies, alongside criteria for selection based on external pressure and relationships rather than merit) and with research centres with reduced budgets and which are perhaps less well-endowed than what can be found in the USA and in Germany, but also in the countries of Northern Europe and in China.

In fourth place, for areas of emigration, comes Sicily (10,649) and then Puglia (8,816). It is worthwhile adding that in fact the largest initial displacement, especially of young people, is from the regions in the South of the country to the North, in order to study and then try to find a job, and only thereafter, in a second stage, to move from there overseas.

The Migrantes Foundation and the CEI (Italian episcopal conference) insist upon a social and ethical evaluation of the situation, on which we should reflect carefully: “Migrating is not linked to any particular economic situation but is a person’s basic human right. And at the centre of the phenomenon of migrations there is always the question of the welcome people receive”, claims Cardinal Gualtiero Bassetti, chair of the CEI.

Here is the fundamental issue: that of the welcome people receive. There is one positive paradigm, Milan and the Lombardy region. This was already noted by the OECD, in its annual report on migration presented in Paris on 20th June last, where it underlined the fact that “in 2016, 82% of the immigrant population” was “in a regular situation and was working in the formal labour sector”.

Milan an attractive place, then. It is ever more popular with young students from half the world. This is documented by the annual survey by the Assolombarda association on the “internationalisation of the universities of Milan and of the Lombardy region”, presented on 25th October last.

What do the data tell us? For the 2016-2017 academic year there were 12,878 international enrolments: of these, 2,017 were Chinese and more than half the students were enrolled in “STEM” diploma courses (that is to say Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, those most highly sought-after by technologically avant-garde businesses). Their number continues to grow: 2.4% more than the preceding year. An increase in line with the observations for the more recent years: there were 12,020 in ’14-’15 and 12,577 in ’15-’16. The survey, now in its eighth edition, takes into consideration 13 of the region’s universities, 8 of which are based in Milan: the Politecnico, Bocconi, Cattolica, Humanitas, IULM, Università Statale, Bicocca and San Raffaele. Additionally, the LIUC in Castellanza, and the Universities of Bergamo, Brescia, Pavia and of Insubria. Pietro Guindani, vice-chair of the Assolombarda association, with responsibility for Universities and Innovation, makes the following comment: “The Report highlights the process of the international opening up of the Lombardy region’s academic sector. And it is in our interests to develop the attractiveness of our universities. Starting with an increase in the offers of courses in the English language, a critical choice for helping students to make headway in the international community”.

There are other interesting observations, in the Assolombarda Report: an almost equal proportion between the genders (52.2% female and 47.8% male): the substantial majority are enrolled in diploma courses of the first and second levels and for a single cycle (90.5% of international students), whilst the remaining 9.5% are involved in post-graduate courses such as doctorates, masters and specialist academies. As far as their geographical origins are concerned, 42.6% come from Europe and 38.4% from Asia, but in absolute terms the most highly represented nationality is that of China with 2,017 students, followed by Iran (876 students), India (752 students) and Switzerland (751 students).

What attracts so many foreign students?As far as the Lombardy region universities are concerned, their international students choose STEM courses the most frequently (50.1% compared with 40% previously) and, in increasing numbers, courses in art and design (6.1% against 1.4%). A result which is probably also linked to the prestige of the Made in Italy brand and to the excellent reputation of Milan in the sector of design and creative work. There is also an increasing number of students involved in exchange programmes. Compared with the 2015 – 2016 year, there were 17,820 in all (+5.3%), of whom 10,737 were Italians leaving (+0.6%) and 7,083 foreigners arriving (+13.2%). Finally, from the survey it emerges how well the Lombardy region universities, and in particular those of Milan, when compared with the rest of Italy’s universities, distinguish themselves for the number of courses offered in the English language: respectively 24.2% and 28.7% of the total, as against 16.3% for all Italian universities.

Milan is attractive, then, for the strength of its “polytechnical culture”. And as a city which is open, dynamic and engaging. An urban, economic and social dimension to which we should draw everyone’s attention, specifically in terms of the vitality of the city and of the region.  Let us focus on a couple of numbers: the 22 thousand who leave the Lombardy region, and the 13 thousand students who arrive here. A virtuous exchange of knowledge, culture, attitudes, lifestyles and outlooks onto the world. A human capital and a social capital which are constantly being renewed. A positive sign for our future.

The “Stories from the World of Pirelli” section has already taken a look at press photographers covering cycling races – the art of capturing fatigue. Today we look at photo journalists and motorcar racing – the art of capturing speed. One of the first photo reportages of a motoring competition was of the 1907 Peking-Paris race: a photo shoot involving a number of people, for local photographers, or members of the Italian team on board the Itala, would be asked to take photos in the towns they went through. The iconic photo of the victorious arrival at the Porte de Joinville was by the Parisian agency Branger and it became a souvenir-postcard for sale to racing fans. Whenever there was a race in the Roaring Twenties, a man from the Strazza Photo Reportage agency would be on the spot with his camera: in our stories, we have already seen him in action at cycling races and, of course, we also find him at the most famous motorcar-racing circuits. Like at the Monza race track, which had just been opened for the 1923 Italian Grand Prix, where Strazza’s lens picked out the American driver Jimmy Murphy at the wheel of his Miller, on which the number “5” has just been painted. But the Strazza photo to be remembered in motorcar racing is surely the famous shot of 1925 when, again at Monza, the driver Gastone Brilli-Peri is immortalised as he hurtles towards victory in the Italian Grand Prix to become the World Champion, with a row of “Gomme Pirelli” advertising posters in the background.

Another photographer we mentioned when talking about cycling races was the former cyclist Lauro Bordin. Also Bordin took his camera and made a number of photo shoots on motor-racing circuits: at the start of the Circuito di Milano in 1936, for example. The driver we see is Omobono Tenni, a motorcyclist “borrowed” by motorcar racing, as was often the case back then, as the illustrious career of Tazio Nuvolari on two and on four wheels clearly shows. But Tenni, who was unbeatable on a motorbike, crashed out with his Maserati on the seventh lap.

Ferruccio Testi was an amateur photographer from Modena and, by no coincidence, the star of many of his shots was the most famous Modenese of all: Enzo Ferrari. In 1931 Testi immortalised him with the cyclist Costante Girardengo, this time in a car, and we see the boss of the Squadra Corse Alfa Romeo in 1932, looking visibly satisfied under a “Pirelli Stella Bianca” banner, together with Vittorio Jano, an Alfa designer. In 1933 we see Ferrari smiling at Testi’s camera during the “oath of eternal fidelity” with the drivers Nuvolari and Mario Umberto Baconin Borzacchini in the woods in San Damaso.

The immediate post-war period, with its irresistible return to motor racing, was often captured by the photographer Corrado Millanta. From Pontremoli in Tuscany, at a very young age Millanta moved to Milan, where he put his stamp on scores of photographs that are now in our Historical Archive. In 1948 a renewed craving for speed was clear to see behind Bruno Sterzi’s spectacles at the Circuito di Vercelli, and in Felice Bonetto’s counter-steering in his Cisitalia in Mantua, as well as in the streamlined silhouette of Besana’s Ferrari at the Circuito delle Cascine. Another magnificent shot by Millanta shows the driver of Osca no. 52 from above at the Circuito del Tigullio. It was 1949, and the following year would see the birth of Formula One. But that’s another story.

The job of people who take part in politics and government is to try to change the numbers involved in things which are not working. Not by denying them or falsifying them, obviously. But by working (through choices, reforms, administrative actions, agreements, treaties) in order to construct a new equilibrium, and improved conditions for economic development, jobs and lifestyles. In order to do so, however, it is necessary to know what are the numbers, the data (the annual accounts, the indices, the statistics) which explain how things are going. Otherwise, any demagogic and heedless leader will simply seek to rubbish the “stubborn reality of the numbers”, as is rightly pointed out by Francesco Giavazzi, a competent economist, on the front page of the Corriere della Sera newspaper (20th October).

What numbers? The ones which have led to the Moody’s downgrade of our national debt to Baa3, barely one notch above the level of “junk bonds” (“a deficit much greater than was expected” and growth forecasts provided by the government for 2019, at 1.5% of GDP, on which the “manoeuvre” (Italian economic plan) is based, which are too “optimistic” and therefore scarcely credible; our national debt as a proportion of GDP consequently will not fall but will increase). The spread which is increasing, well beyond 330 basis points, with fears that it will reach 400 (which means more costly expense to finance the 400Bn Euros of annual national borrowing, since as debtors we are scarcely credible and thus the risk premium for lending us money is higher). That 2.4% ratio of the deficit to GDP (linked to the the programmes for current public spending for citizenship revenues and pensions) which the EU consider to be in breach of the rules and financial balances. The 67Bn Euros of capital invested in Italian Treasury Bonds which between May and August have been removed from Italy because international investors have no faith in an Italy governed in such confusion by the “yellow and greens” (M5S + Lega) (and this financial haemorrhage continues). The economic slowdown, calculated by the ISTATI, IMF, Confindustria and Confcommercio: at barely 1% of GDP, or perhaps even worse, 0.9%, rather different from the “optimistic” 1.5% from the Government.

We prefer our citizens to “little numbers”, the happiness of the people to the assessments of the “spread men”, the rights of the poor to the judgements of “the market” and of the “strong powers”, say the demagogues in the Government. But the “little numbers” are our incomes and our savings, the jobs that businesses will no longer be able to create because uncertainty reigns over the regulations for the labour market, tax (tax amnesties have a devastating effect over the medium term on the behaviour and expectations of honest businesses which pay their taxes correctly), and exports (threatened as they are by protectionist temptations, given that they are aimed at foreign markets which are open to all). The “little numbers” are the mortgages which will cost families more and the loans which will be more difficult and expensive to obtain and which will aggravate corporate debt levels (“A credit crunch and higher borrowing costs, a double whammy for businesses”, was the headline on Sunday, 21st October, with accounts to prove it, in a daily paper which really knows its way around numbers, Il Sole24Ore). The “little numbers” are the cuts in funding and in tax incentives to businesses which, with the evolution of digital applications and “Industry 4.0”, have invested, innovated and created wealth and jobs. The “little numbers” are the funds which in the “manoeuvre” economic plan are missing, to finance research, innovation, teaching, scientific and technological training, trademarks, and start-ups by the young who, as entrepreneurs, are seeking to build a future, wealth and jobs and so to escape from the shallows of an impoverished and bewildered generation. The “little numbers” are the halt on public works which have already gone ahead. As is condemned so succinctly by Pietro Salini, CEO of Salini Impregilo, one of the Italian construction companies which is most highly esteemed across the world (it recently won a tender of 700 million Euros for the Grand Paris Express, a new transport system for the French capital): “The delayed decisions of the Government in respect of the portfolio of works pending in Italy are threatening 5 thousand hirings and 800 million Euros of turnover”.

Because of all this, businesses are quite right to express their serious concerns about the direction of travel of the economic situation, the Government’s programmes, and the reckless challenges to Europe. “We risk a junk future”, proclaimed Alessio Rossi, Chair of the Confindustria Young Entrepreneurs, on Saturday 20th, at the annual convention of the association in Capri. “No to a Nanny State” which invests in a policy of State assistance rather than competitiveness, in subsidies rather than jobs and infrastructure, is what Carlo Bonomi, Chair of the Assolombarda association, said on Thursday 18th to the annual assembly of the biggest territorial organisation in Confindustria, with 6 thousand businesses enrolled, largely small and medium-sized ones, nearly all of them innovative and active internationally. He is against a Government policy which puts a block on public works, slows down exports with its protectionist temptations, invests in nothing except revenues for no work and early pensions (and nearly all debt-funded, too), compromises the role of Italy in Europe and undermines holdings of the common currency, the Euro (except for reassurances of there being no desire to leave it) – this is what the entrepreneurs of important sector groups of Lazio and the Veneto regions, of Piedmont and of Emilia are saying: all of the “GDP segment” to which the Government pays scant regard, in line with the ideology, especially that of Beppe Grillo’s followers, which considers that “businesses” are pitted against “the people”: crude, demagogic and risky sociology.

Businesses are not the opposition, they are not fans of the Government or of its adversarial policies. But they have a good understanding of what is really happening in front of them, they know the value of the market and the values of the people and the regions. And they are rightly alarmed. Their voice is that of active Italy, that of the forces for real change which on so many other occasions have created a better destiny for the country: from the Reconstruction after the disaster of war and of Fascism (Aldo Cazzullo is correct when, in the pages of “We shall never be hungry again”, his latest book published by Mondadori, he claims that we need to use a capital “R”, as in Risorgimento (Resurgence) or Resistenza (Resistance)) to the economic boom of the Fifties and Sixties, from the battle against terrorism to overcome the “leaden years” to the commitment to re-emerge from the  extremely serious crisis of the early Nineties, when we bound ourselves to the EU and to the Euro.

A voice, then, to which we should listen, carefully and with respect.

At the Assolombarda assembly, the entrepreneurs packed extremely tightly into the La Scala opera house gave some resounding applause to the message sent by Sergio Mattarella, the President of the Republic, an institution which the entrepreneurs look up to in terms of trust, values and democratic guarantees. A message which is something far removed from a simple ritual, which is worth reading and re-reading carefully. Here it is, starting with the comments of the Presidency about Milan: “Milan and the Lombardy region are the expression of a model characterised by the virtuous interaction between manufacturing, services, research institutes and universities, with remarkable results in terms of innovation, attraction of skills, and creativity”. And they are “the bearers of a desire for a better future, based on a sense of responsibility, and maturity on the part of the civil society, of the institutions and of businesses”. There is in fact “a profound sense of community to which the business world is not unrelated, and indeed is a major player”.

President Mattarella reminds us that the actions of this world “are attributable in large measure to the ability to create connections, generating greater international impact, and an increased integration between manufacturing systems and quality of life”.

Milan and businesses, then, as drivers of growth. But also as positive social actors, during conditions of crisis. Mattarella maintains: “The metropolitan areas are today major drivers of growth, or instead places of marginalisation, and of unease. During my recent visits to excellent examples of these territories, to Milan and to Monza, I have been given confirmation of how Lombardy and Milan have, on many levels, succeeded in being fundamental locations for guidance, orientation, and greater understanding”. Why? “It is a question of exploiting that sentiment and those civic virtues which are able to create authentic interdependence, by uniting the resources provided by businesses with the common purposes of the whole country”.

The President of the Republic goes on to argue, against introspection and protectionism, in favour of other ideas close to the hearts of the business world: “The quality of Italian businesses and their ability to secure their positions in the international markets by taking a position in the chains of global wealth creation will prosper only in a world which is open and integrated. The slowdown in the international trade cycle, the indications of future tensions and protectionist measures are at risk of adversely affecting confidence”.

What can be done?  “A collective show of strength is indispensable to demonstrate the abilities of our country to handle the challenges. We need a constructive dialogue and a keen sense of responsibility, on the part of our politicians, our institutions, our businesses, our associations and our civil society, in order to make conscious choices with a long-term perspective in the collective interest”.

A deeply meaningful message, then. Long-term perspectives are exactly the sort which guide businesses. Collective interest, the point of reference. To pick up again on the idea at the beginning, we need to be very clear about the numbers which need changing. Without plucking the numbers out of a hat.