Milan, 14 April 2010. The Pirelli Foundation has officially opened its doors to the public with an inauguration ceremony attended by more than four hundred people.

Welcoming guests was a friendly black act, a gigantic reproduction of “Gatto Meo” designed by Bruno Munari for Pirelli in 1949, as well as the original drawing by Renato Guttuso, “La Ricerca Scientifica”, which was the basis for a mosaic of the same name commissioned by Pirelli and executed by mosaic artists from Ravenna in 1961, also on display in the Foundation’s viewing room.

Amidst the original sketches of famous designers such as Bob Noorda, Manzi, Fletcher, the red shoes worn by Carl Lewis in a famous ad campaign, historical films, advertisements of yesterday and today, and the entire collection of Pirelli magazine, signed by famous figures including Eugenio Montale, Alberto Moravia, Umberto Saba, Carlo Emilio Gadda, and Umberto Eco, the evening took visitors on a symbolic voyage through the immense cultural heritage of Pirelli’s Historical Archive, which are now available to the public thanks to the efforts to recover, classify and digitize the materials promoted by the company and by the Pirelli family.

Speakers at the inauguration included Marco Tronchetti Provera, Pirelli chairman and the Foundation’s president, Cecilia and Alberto Pirelli, the Foundation’s honorary president and member of the board, respectively, Antonio Calabrò, director of Corporate Culture for Pirelli and the director of the Foundation, and a number of leading regional and municipal authorities, such as Roberto Formigoni, president of the Region of Lombardy, and Alberto Meomartini, chairman of Assolombarda, who both underscored the importance of the sort of history and corporate culture that Pirelli represents so well.

One hundred thirty-eight years of history and more than two and a half kilometres of documents have come back home to the historic Building 134 at the Bicocca, Milan.

Milan, 23 June 2009. The first event held by the Pirelli Foundation – which has been established, but is awaiting the completion of work being done on its offices in Bicocca – to promote Italian corporate culture was the photography exhibit “Men, machines, ideas” held at La Triennale di Milano from 23 June to 23 July 2009.

The exhibit, held in the Impluvium hall, was a visual art installation of seventy photos by Anglo-Italian photographer Carlo Furgeri Gilbert, including ten large-format prints and the rest of the photos projected onto three large screens, in order to tell the story of Pirelli’s Italian and European factories through the faces, movement and sounds they contained each day. It is the story of a true culture of machines, one which changes and yet maintains its sense of community, of rich, active relationships.

The inauguration was opened by Pirelli chairman Marco Tronchetti Provera, Giulio Ballio, deputy chairman of Triennale di Milano and rector of Politecnico di Milano; Alberto Meomartini, chairman of Assolombarda; and Massimiliano Finazzer Flory, councillor responsible for Culture for the City of Milan.

In Turin on 23 March 2009, the Giovanni Agnelli Foundation, the Edoardo Garrone Foundation and the Pirelli Foundation announced the creation of Associazione per la Formazione d’Eccellenza, a non-profit association intended to promote excellence in education in relation to the needs and outlook for the business and research, as well as the association’s first project: Scuola di Alta Formazione al Management.

With the conviction that investing in the future is key even in periods of crisis, the three foundations took action to promote practical solutions to the need to better educate young people, with a focus on quality and innovation. This led to Scuola di Alta Formazione al Management, in partnership with Collège des Ingénieurs, one of Europe’s most authoritative schools in the field of management training.

Scuola di Alta Formazione al Management targets young graduates in engineering and other scientific and economic disciplines (15 the first year, 40 once full operations have been achieved), providing them with specialist, full-time training in business administration, including 4 months of classroom training and 6 months of action learning inside businesses. In these internships, the students became junior consultants within companies, working on projects of strategic interest.

The course program is free of charge for the students, who are selected based on merit and previous education and background, and not based on income. In fact, students also receive a salary thanks to the fact that they are hired on fixed-term employment contracts for the entire training period. This sets this programme apart from other similar ones.

Courses began in September 2009. Classroom work (conducted in English) is held in part together with the instructors and other students of Collège des Ingénieurs in Paris, Stuttgart and San Gallo, and in part in Turin with instructors from Italian universities and polytechnic schools and from the business world.