November 1948: when Pirelli magazine carried a portrait of him under the title “Style and Power”, Adolfo Consolini had been an employee of A.G.A. (Articoli Gomma e Affini, a Pirelli Group subsidiary) for almost a year. As an official “producer”, he used to go around Milan on his scooter offering shopkeepers various rubber items such as car mats, household items, and toys. At five in the afternoon he would invariably be at the Pirelli sports field in Viale Sarca, right in front of the Bicocca factory, for his customary training session. Because this rubber-goods salesman had for some months also been an Olympic gold medallist as a discus thrower: in London 1948, where he took top spot with 52.78 metres. The thirty-year-old from Verona – standing 183 cm tall and weighing in at 99 kilos – also held the world record for that year, with 55.33 metres.

In other words, Pirelli’s A.G.A. had a true champion in its midst. Pirelli magazine returned to Consolini in 1950, with a fine article entitled “Athletes to Illustrate Gulliver” by Corrado Pizzinelli. With the athlete, who in the meantime had won yet another gold, at the European Championships in Brussels, was his colleague Teseo Taddia, who had also been working at A.G.A. for some time. And he too was a champion: throwing the hammer 54.73 metres and winning silver in Brussels. These champions were “two giants who look as though they’re straight out of an illustration for Gulliver’s trip to Brobdingnag”, according to the journalist Pizzinelli, “but who have no custom-built cars, nor villas, nor even any industries. Two archangels of sport, candid, starry-eyed, pure, simple, and poor”. Consolini tells of how he was about to indulge in a few days’ holiday by the sea, to enjoy his world record, when along comes the American Fortune Everett Gordien and snatches his record from him: “How can one stay calm? Me, you know, there’s no way! I tore up the note and went off to train…”

Consolini went on to three more Olympic Games, winning silver in Helsinki 1952. Melbourne 1956 and Rome 1960 were to be where one of the greatest and best-loved Italian athletes would bow out, with great honour. Meanwhile, he had married the Slovenian Hanny Cuk in 1951 and their son Sergio was born in 1956. The Pirelli house organ Fatti e Notizie devoted a page to his wedding with Hanny, with “best wishes from all Pirelliani to Adolfo Consolini and his esteemed spouse”. Consolini was an expert in rubber products – in addition to the wood and metal of his discus, of course – but he also learnt to handle horseshoes: in 1953 he played the part of the farrier Maciste in the film Cronache di poveri amanti, which the filmmaker Carlo Lizzani based on the novel by Vasco Pratolini. Legend has it that, turning a quarrel scene, he acted with such realism that he really did knock out the great Marcello Mastroianni.

Consolini died on 20 December 1969 at the age of fifty-two. For some time he had been the manager of the Finished Products Warehouse at Milano Bicocca, overseeing a dozen workers. “You could hardly say he was a traditional boss,” recalls a worker, Alfredo, in Fatti e Notizie. “We had such a level of collaboration with him that he’d even be helping us load and unload the goods”. From our archive, another story of sport, another story of factory work.

The Nuvola Lavazza experience told in a book from the very beginning until its opening to the public

An undertaking in a city that is in turn a community. And the latter which permeates the company, also a community. All in a continuous swapping of experiences, instances, sensations, perspectives, problems and solutions. If you look closely, this is the condition in which all production organisations in fact find themselves in (perhaps unconsciously). For some of these, however, the relationship with their surrounding territory acquires particular meaning, which can be studied in depth because this is useful to everyone. This is the case of Lavazza in Turin. A food company par excellence (which has truly played a really important part of the history of the industry in Italy and across the world), located in a city that has been the paradigm of metalwork for decades, Lavazza decided to renew its presence in Turin, starting with the complete restyling of its headquarters (just a stone’s throw from the location it was founded in more than one hundred years ago). This led to an experiment for the renovation of the relationship between the company and the local community, between production organisation and new urban dialogue requirements. An experiment that has only just begun and that it is well worth observing. And proof of business culture that has also been told through a book.

Nuvola Lavazza – this is the name given to the new company headquarters – was therefore explored with a very different set of eyes. The result is “Nuvola Lavazza. Cultura d’impresa e trasformazioni delle città” (Nuvola Lavazza. Business culture and transformations of the city), written by multiple authors and just recently published. Everything obviously begins with the recently completed construction, which is referred to as more than a building: something that – in the intentions of those who designed and supported it –, becomes a portal that connects the city with the business world, a place that opens up to the community and becomes an authentic resource for the local territory. So not just the executive centre, but also two restaurants, a business museum and a huge event venue where culture can co-exist with innovation to tackle the future with greater awareness. An important challenge, also taking into account the fact that the area in which Lavazza is located is in no way central.

The Nuvola is therefore described from the very beginning (in 2007) of its design to the present day, through the works of Giuseppe Culicchia, Cino Zucchi, Camilla Zanarotti, Ralph Appelbaum, Ferran Adrià, Federico Zanasi, Dante Ferretti, Marco Belpoliti, Carlo Petrini and Matteo Pericoli.
The book is really good as a tale of growing business culture, starting with the past to look to the future, with courage and while taking a few risks. Definitely worth reading.

Nuvola Lavazza. Cultura d’impresa e trasformazioni della città (Business culture and transformations of the city)
et.al.
Minimum Fax, 2018

On Saturday 20 October, the Pirelli Foundation will take part in the fourth “Archivi Aperti” week (19-27 October 2018) organised by Rete Fotografia on the theme “Photography in Italy in the 1960s”, with guided tours of the rich photographic heritage preserved by the Foundation. In particular, it will show its photos for Pirelli: Rivista d’informazione e di tecnica, the historic company magazine published from 1948 to 1972. For over two decades, the magazine was an arena for the most advanced cultural debates in Italy. It epitomised the fusion of liberal culture and scientific and technical knowledge, with the contribution of famous authors such as Dino Buzzati, Italo Calvino, Gillo Dorfles, Umberto Eco, Arrigo Levi, Eugenio Montale, Salvatore Quasimodo, Elio Vittorini, and dozens of others.

For the extraordinary opening for the “Archivi Aperti”, a special guided tour will focus on the 1960s through the eyes of the great photographers who worked with the magazine: from Ugo Mulas’s encounters with the great protagonists of contemporary art to Arno Hammacher’s documentation of the construction of the Milan metro system. And then there are the photo shoots by Fulvio Roiter, Enzo Sellerio and the great photojournalism agencies of the time.

The collection of photographs used for the magazine consists of over 5,000 published and unpublished prints. These are some of the approximately 700,000 photographs of products, factories, trade fairs and shows, and motorcar, motorcycle and cycling races, as well as fashion shoots, that constitute the photographic holdings of the company’s Historical Archive.

During the special opening for “Archivi Aperti”, visitors will also be able to see Advertising with a Capital P, the new multimedia display put on to celebrate the Foundation’s tenth anniversary. The event is devoted to Pirelli’s stunning audio-visual materials, with a focus on the company’s advertising campaigns from the 1970s to the early 2000s.

Saturday, 20 October 2018

Two admission times: 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. (duration of the visit: about 1 hour and 30 minutes)

Booking required, while places last. Please write to:

visite@fondazionepirelli.org

An engineer, designer, inventor, record-breaker, and motorcycle rider and motorcar driver. Piero Taruffi was all this and maybe even more, but one need only read the “The Five Hundred Miles” that he wrote for Pirelli magazine in 1962 to understand what a distillation of know-how his life became: three pages to read all in one go.

Born in Albano Laziale in 1906, Taruffi raced in order verify his innovative technical insights, and as he raced, he chased after yet more insights, and then tested them again on the track. It was almost inevitable that his keen focus on every aspect of the machine would bring him into contact with Pirelli. The Historical Archive of the Pirelli Foundation contains documents dated between June and October 1937 that give the results of tests carried out in the laboratory on Pirelli Moto-Cord tyres, which were “special tyres for motorcycle records”. It was these “ultralight ribbed S” tyres that Taruffi used that year on the Bergamo-Brescia motorway to set an unparalleled series of speed records with the Gilera 500 Rondine, for which he himself had created the fairing in order to improve the aerodynamics. Meanwhile, his passion for fast driving led him to race and win everywhere, on both two and four wheels: in cars with Alfa Romeo, Maserati, and Cisitalia, and on motorcycles with a Norton 500 and “his” Gilera Rondine.

The record-breaking Taruffi was certainly no man to accept limitations, which is why, in 1948, he went back to the Pirelli test laboratories to fit out his new challenger: the TARF bisiluro, or “twin torpedo”. Just as the pre-war Rondine had been a record-breaking motorcycle, so two Rondini placed side by side would become a record-breaking car: simple, right? Fitted once again with ultra-light Pirelli motorcycle tyres, the TARF consisted of two cylindrical bodies joined together to form a sort of double motorcycle with fairings: one torpedo for the rider, the other for a Guzzi 500 engine. With the TARF – and later with the Maserati-powered TARF 2 – Taruffi notched up speed record after speed record between 1948 and 1954, flashing by at 300 km/h on the tried-and-tested Bergamo-Brescia motorway, and later on the SS 7 trunk road, the so-called Fettuccia di Terracina, and then on the French circuit at Monthléry. His bisiluro became the stuff of motor-racing legend.

The engineer-driver certainly never abandoned car racing, for he was in Formula 1 with Ferrari, Maserati, and Vanwall between 1950 and 1956, in the Targa Florio with Lancia, and in the Susa-Moncenisio with Cisitalia. And again – once again with Ferrari – in the Carrera Panamericana, which earned him the nickname “Silver Fox”. However, the Mille Miglia was missing from his prize list, but he said to his wife Isabella: “When I win, I’ll stop racing”. He left Brescia on 11 May 1957 at the wheel of a Ferrari 4000 on the 24th Mille Miglia. And he won it, at last. This was the last-ever Mille Miglia: the race was cancelled after the tragic accident of the Spaniard Alfonso De Portago in Guidizzolo, in the Alto Mantovano. But Taruffi had won the race – his last Mille Miglia. And, just as he had promised, it was his last triumph.

Ever since the mission that would guide the activities of the Pirelli Foundation was established ten years ago, interaction with young people has always been considered a fundamental factor, and an essential condition to which maximum attention must be paid. By interacting with educational institutions, the relationship with the younger generations has become increasingly close, to the point that it has become a real strategic asset in the form of the teaching project of Pirelli Foundation Educational.

Since 2013, Pirelli Foundation Educational has put on a free programme of training courses for schools of different types and levels, with the aim of introducing younger people to the values enshrined in the Group’s corporate culture. The scope of the issues examined in the teaching programme expands every year, ranging from the history and technology of tyres to corporate cinema, sustainability and robotics, and from photography to the evolution of advertising graphics. All the teaching courses, which involve about three thousand students each year, are divided into theory and workshop activities in the field so that children can freely bring out all their creativity in reinterpreting what they have learnt.

The company has thus opened the doors of its research and production centres so that young people can gain first-hand knowledge of how a tyre is created: some of the courses include visits to the Research and Development department – with its indoor experimentation and its chemistry and physics laboratories – in the Pirelli area of Milano-Bicocca, as well hands-on experiences at the Pirelli Industrial Centre in Settimo Torinese or in the Modular Integrated Robotized System (Next MIRS) facility in Milan, where the potential offered by Industry 4.0 is studied at the highest levels. Since 2013 the Foundation has involved about 12,000 children and young people, who have thus come into contact with the company. Its aim is also to assist young people on their learning curve towards understanding the complex reality of the digital factory that the Pirelli Educational Foundation – in agreement with the Research and Development department – offers its support to the Educational Robotics Festival, an event created by the Associazione di Promozione Sociale Amici della Scuola G.B. Pirelli in collaboration with the University of Milano-Bicocca. The aim here is to promote the development of robotics for young people in the field of education.

Another project the Pirelli Foundation worked on – in 2016 – was “Il bullismo in Offside” (making bullying offside), which was set up by the Ministry of Education, Universities and Research (MIUR) and promoted by the F.C. Internazionale football club, of which Pirelli is a historical sponsor: a small but extremely important step towards becoming raising awareness of the problems related to the world of young people. In 2017 the Pirelli Foundation also took part in the 5th Innovation and Science Festival in Settimo Torinese, offering training activities for about 400 children and young people. And then, in the first months of 2018, it also helped put on a refresher course for teachers called Cinema & History, by then in its seventh edition: a free training course for teachers of primary and secondary schools of Lombardy Region promoted by Fondazione ISEC in collaboration with Fondazione Cineteca Italiana.

Pirelli Foundation Educational’s activities for primary and secondary schools also includes constant interaction with the world of universities. Over the years, the Foundation has formed joint ventures with top universities in Italy and abroad, creating customised workshops for various undergraduate courses (Industrial Design, Architecture, and Sociology), as well as assisting undergraduates studying at and consulting the Historical Archive.

Pirelli Foundation Educational’s range of different training solutions is based on experimentation, creativity, and interaction, as well as the adoption of innovative technologies and digital instruments, both for children who are entering school for the first time and for students who are almost at the end of their studies. Accompanying the younger generations in their discovery of the values of corporate culture.

One of the most important works preserved by the Pirelli Foundation is a photograph of extraordinary size (245 x 150 cm). It is of Workers Leaving the Pirelli Factory in Via Ponte Seveso (now Via Fabio Filzi) in 1905, and it is emblematic of the development and solidity of the company, which at the time was expanding rapidly. The building was completed in 1873 – a year after G.B. Pirelli & C. was incorporated – with a surface area of 1,000 square metres. At the time of the photo, the plant had already reached its greatest possible expansion, covering an area of ​​34,000 square metres, with about 3,000 employees.

Shortly after, in order to increase tyre production, which was added to that of miscellaneous items and cables, Pirelli opened a new plant not far away, in the Bicocca area. The picture gives a clear idea of the power of this industrial group, and the moment it was taken was no coincidence, for it was in the feverish run-up to what was to be a key event for Milan and for Milanese and Italian industries: the Milan International world expo of 1906. Like any great exhibition, this too generated a vast production of graphic, photographic and cinematographic images. In particular, it offered a great opportunity for a young Milanese photographer, who was launched by none other than Pirelli into the world of industrial photography: Luca Comerio, who debuted at the age of twenty with a photographic reportage on the 1898 Milan insurrection, published in Illustrazione Italiana. In the years leading up to the Expo, Luca Comerio worked for a number of Milanese industries, helping create their public image with photographs of groups of workers and employees. Pirelli was the first to commission him to take a photo of its workers, and it was published in L’Automobile magazine on 10 November 1905, in an issue devoted to Italian automotive-sector manufacturers.

The following year, Comerio made the stunning blow-up of the shot, which he then signed, and it was shown in the Pirelli Pavilion at the Expo in 1906. It appears in the balance sheet for that year, in which the expenses include 482 lire paid to the photographer for “enlargements of pictures showing workers leaving and a view of the factory in Milan”. In all likelihood made using a solar enlarger, the picture is unlike any other in terms of the size of the enlargement – which is extraordinary for the time, especially because it is made on a single sheet of photographic paper measuring 245 x 150 cm – but also in terms of its imagery. Compared with the group photographs that Comerio later made for other companies in the automotive sector, such as Isotta Fraschini and Fiat, the Pirelli picture is different in that it shows the workers coming out of the factory gates: a sea of humanity that fills Via Galileo Galilei, at the back of the factory, as far as the eye can see. The people look up at the photographer’s lens, which is in an elevated position so as to take in the whole street. This approach was dropped in subsequent photographs, in favour of more traditional poses, standing or sitting, with the factory behind.

This extraordinary enlargement has fortunately come down to us in fair condition, although it does show signs of wear. An initial restoration was carried out in 2000, when the photograph was shown in Il mondo nuovo, an exhibition at the Palazzo Reale in Milan. In 2018 the Pirelli Foundation commissioned a new conservation project, with thorough cleaning and re-tensioning of the photograph on its frame.

Luca Comerio: a documentarian for Pirelli

Having established himself as a photographer at the Milan Expo, which he captured in numerous photos that were published in the most important magazines of the time, the following year Luca Comerio turned to a new form of expression, which was that of cinema. He produced a wealth of films, including many scientific and industrial documentaries. These included a film made for Pirelli that records the visit of King Victor Emmanuel III to the Bicocca factory, which can be seen on our website along with hundreds of other audio-visual materials.

The Italian Grand Prix at Monza last weekend was dedicated to Alberto Ascari, one of the greatest drivers in the history of motor racing. In spite of his considerable size, he was called “little Ascari”, or “Ascarino”, because he was the son of Antonio Ascari, a driver who became a legend in the Roaring Twenties. Antonio was born in Bonferraro, in the province of Verona, in 1888. And it cannot be just a coincidence that, four years later, a certain Tazio Nuvolari would be born in Castel d’Ario, just a few miles away, in the province of Mantua. This is why, in his portrait of the “Flying Mantuan”, published in the first issue of Pirelli magazine, the journalist Orio Vergani referred to the area as a sort of “land of courage”. Antonio repaired tractor engines and, in that workshop out in the middle of the fields, he learned to work with carburettors and connecting rods and pistons. It was his brother who instilled the idea in him that he might also work with cars. Possibly even racing cars. And possibly even get into them and drive them…

So Antonio moved to Milan, first to De Vecchi to learn how cars were made, and then to Alfa Romeo: first as a mechanic, then as a test driver. And, lastly, as a racing driver. Ascari was ready to show the world what he was capable of, already on the eve of the Italian Grand Prix of 1923, in his brand new Alfa P1 at Monza. The great Alfa Romeo team was to be unbeatable: Ascari in number 6, Giuseppe Campari in 12, and Ugo Sivocci in 17. And when Sivocci died in a crash during the practice sessions, someone noticed that the green four-leaf clover, which had become a symbol of Alfa, had not been placed on his car. The team withdrew, and never again would there be a number 17 in a race.

Things went right the following year. With his Alfa P2 8C fitted with Pirelli Cord tyres, Ascari finally managed to win the Italian Grand Prix – which was also the European Grand Prix that year – at Monza in October 1924. With a time of 3 minutes and 34 seconds, the Alfa Romeo driver set a lap record that was destined to remain unbeaten for many years. Always by his side was the inseparable Giuseppe Campari, his team-mate friend and opponent. The customary triumph of Alfa (Ascari as the winner and Campari in second place) came again the following year at the Belgian Grand Prix at Spa. But it was to be the last.

Maybe Ascari was too hot-headed that day on the Monthléry circuit at the French Grand Prix in 1925. Some say he went too fast round the corner, others maintained there should never have been the fence, which got caught in the wheel, sending the car flying and the driver hurtling to the ground. Antonio Ascari died on 26 July 1925. Aged almost thirty-seven.

His son Alberto, who was seven years old at the time, made a vow to himself that, if he ever followed in his father’s footsteps as a driver, he would never race on the 26th. And then, when he became a driver, he added that he would never be parted from his lucky blue helmet. He lost his life in Monza in 1955 – almost exactly thirty years after his father, also at the age of almost thirty-seven – while test-driving a Ferrari 750. His friends and colleagues Gigi Villoresi and Eugenio Castellotti called him over to Monza and he, Alberto, had willingly accepted to get into the car and do a few test laps – even though he had left his lucky blue helmet at home, and even though it was 26 May.

A recent book by Fondazione Feltrinelli focuses on what “work” means today

Work is perhaps one of the most important aspects of modern life that is most strongly affected by the changes under way. Work as an important part of life, as a fundamental element of a company, as an instrument of dignity of men and women. Hence – of course – the need to know all about the changes, the paths, the relations with the context that work endures on the one hand abd builds up on the other. Reading “Il lavoro conta? Sfide, pratiche e politiche per un lavoro di qualità” (Does work count? Challenges, policies and practices for quality work) which has just recently been published as part of the Utopie collection by Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, is therefore a useful step for those wishing to acquire a conceptual framework of work which might prove useful for understanding the reality of the situation.

The book contains the results of the third edition of the Jobless Society Forum “Does work count?” and it has a clear objective: “To attribute a new centrality to work as a source of income, as a factor of development and together as the fertile soil for individual emancipation and community cohesion”. The volume thus collects the contributions to the Forum and the tales of the 9 thematic tables that during the day of the Forum discussed training, skills, youth employment, women’s employment, migrant workers, innovation and welfare policies, enterprises and inclusive growth, irregular work/ work at risk of contractual misconduct, gig economy and platform work. There is only one common thread: asking ourselves about the challenges, policies and practices for quality work.

The text is explained in a simple and clear way: it starts with a summary focusing on the subjects of training, social welfare, young people and women, equity and migrants, protection and exploitation; then it addresses the various reports  that derive from the all-round debates held during the discussions.

The conclusions of the Jobless Society Forum are multiple. First of all, the book explains that “work counts with a dual objective: on the one hand, to combat and to deal in a collective manner with the discontinuity and irregularities currently affecting work and that can lead to economic and social fragility. On the other hand, to promote a growth strategy that has work as its primary core objective, in its dimensions of quantity and quality”.But that’s not all, in a period in which welfare  seems to have been rediscovered, the publication by Fondazione Feltrinelli explains: “Welfare Policies may then be increasingly useful to the collective welfare with a cultural vision that see these measures in the context of a social investment in the country’s human capital”; and adds an important contribution for the manufacturing system: “Companies are in the forefront in tackling this challenge and in seizing the opportunities offered by all that is digital, with the support of the State and the social partners, in promoting high-quality employment for young people, women and immigrants”.

The more general conclusion of the book should also be emphasised: “We cannot reflect on work only in its relationship with technology – it explains -, but we must try to adopt a vision that is as holistic as possible, which allows us to define an economic and societal outlook where work can go back to having a new centrality also in its relationship with globalisation and the ensuing consequences”.

Il lavoro conta? Sfide, pratiche e politiche per un lavoro di qualità (Does work count? Challenges, policies and practices for quality work)

Curated by Andrea Zucca

Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, Utopie/73 Work, July 2018

Here is the Italy that knows nothing of itself, perceives and tells things about itself which are mistaken, amplifies its actual difficulties and, misinformed, ends up as prey to the demagogues. A well-constructed survey by IPSOS, one of the most authoritative research centres in the world, and published by the Corriere della Sera newspaper (31st August) documents (on the basis of 50 thousand interviews over the space of the past five years) how it is actually Italy, out of the 13 countries involved, which has the most mistaken “index of perception” of reality, across a variety of economic and social issues.  Let us take just one example, which may as well be a topical one, of contemporary life, “other people”, the foreigners amongst us. In response to the question “how many Muslim citizens do you think there are for every one hundred inhabitants?”, the Italians reply 20, whereas in reality there are only 3.7. And for “out of 100 prisoners, how many were born in a foreign country?”, the Italians say 48, almost one in two, whereas in fact there are 34.4, one in three. There are similar divergences between perceptions and true facts in matters relating to health, the spread of technologies, work and unemployment, and birth rates. As regards the “index of perception”, we Italians score 100 (the maximum difference between perception and facts) and Sweden, the best informed and most strongly self-aware country, scores 53. In the middle, straight after ourselves, come the USA (90) and France (86), while at the other end of the scale there are the United Kingdom (76), Japan (72) and Germany (64).

“The perils of perception”, is the title of a book written by the author of the research, Bobby Duffy, a political commentator and manager of the English section of IPSOS, which has just been published by Atlantic Books, with a highly explicit sub-title: “Why we’re wrong about nearly everything”. Yes indeed, why are we so misinformed? Because of an excess of information streams, especially in the most hasty and confused media, starting with social media, and because of an ever-rarer critical capability. The effects: a serious crisis of awareness, people throwing themselves into beliefs, prejudices and fake news resulting in serious damage for civil cohabitation, for the equilibrium of the markets and for democracy itself.In Italy, as we have seen, more so and worse than elsewhere.

If we wanted to find noble reasons for such a separation between perception and true facts, we could even jump over to literature. “Così è se vi pare” – Right You Are (if you think so) – was written in 1917 by Luigi Pirandello, in his play about how impossible it is to know what is real. It was an extraordinary theatrical game, a penetrating poetical analysis of uncertainty in a rapidly changing world, but also dilemmas from a century ago.  In modern Italy where battling to grab our attention we find cultural approximation and ignorance, the vulgar dialectic of the “social media” and the hastiest of propaganda, perhaps it is not worthwhile trusting Pirandello’s interpretations of the shortfalls in knowledge or resorting to the sarcasm of Jean Cocteau: “The drama of our era is that stupidity has started to think”.

It would be better, instead, to try to understand the reasons and political sense of what is happening and to reflect upon the ways and on the places in which we can reconstruct a correct relationship between reality and representation.  Knowledge, competence, science, clear and reliable data, are fundamental for liberal democracy but also for balanced and sustainable economic growth (protectionism, border closures, anti-crisis nationalisations, boasted of as remedies to the crisis, instead aggravate its consequences, as the major part of economic literature demonstrates). Something altogether different, in fact, from the vagueness of storytelling or “narrative”, the distorted terms of the public debate. It is instead a matter of learning to reason on the basis of sound information (which has often been missing over recent years) and of insisting upon the essential nature of the values of science, of reliable data (gathered and assessed independently by authoritative research centres) and of a critical spirit.

In times of crisis and of complexities of situations, of conflicts and of divergences of interests, the easy answer is to simplify things via propaganda or to follow the contortions of emotional irrationalism or of “magic ideas” (such as those which seduced German public opinion during the Weimar crisis of the early 1930s and opened the door to Nazism, as is finely related by Benjamin Carter Hett in a book which was recently published in the USA, “The death of democracy – The rise of Hitler and the fall of the Weimar Republic”: rationality gives place to emotions, social unease seeks scapegoats instead of solutions, and critical public opinion transforms itself into a vindictive and angry mob).

We need, then, to reason on the basis of data and facts, documented analyses and reliable information. To read about economics and science. And to subject to verification affirmations and programmes. It is a cultural challenge. And it is precisely the business culture which is the crucial lever for this, based as it is on the rationality of crucial choices, the soundness of competencies, the numerical confirmations of activities, the worthiness of questions and the knowledge which constitutes the fundamental basis of competitiveness.

This is confirmed, specifically on the basis of the research which we are discussing, by Nando Pagnoncelli, chair of IPSOS Italy: “The results of the research give an idea of the seriousness of at least two scourges of our society, which are clearly indicated and extremely alarming. On the one hand, there is the very low level of education, with just 16.3% of graduates within the workforce, which continues to condemn us to the bottom of the EU rankings; on the other, there is the modern media diet where, alongside the TV, there is a dominance of “Do-It-Yourself” information on the Internet and across the social media”.  Minimal culture, disinformation, incompetence, and approximations in judgements. The social and political columns have, for some time, shown us disturbing testimonies of these characteristics.

How do we escape from them? “It will take a long time”, claims Pagnoncelli. And nevertheless “the only solution is that of the assumption of responsibility on the part of the three key elements of society: the institutions, the world of information and citizens themselves”.  One can add schools and, indeed, businesses – those centres for research, for science, and for the verification of results. A multi-technical culture shows that, in this matter too, it represents a tool for liberal democracy and for a crucial relationship with the truth and with growth.

Pirelli has always been a prime mover in the world of communication, and this is clear to see in Advertising with a Capital P, a new exhibition curated by the Pirelli Foundation. The display shows off a treasure trove of drawings made by great Italian and international artists and designers, together with house organs and magazines, and the photographic and audio-visual holdings in the company’s Historical Archive. The new exhibition opens with an immersive video screening that goes back over the projects and events put on by the Foundation in its first ten years of life. Heritage, Art, Racing, Corporate Culture, Sustainability, Factory, Innovation, and Education: 8 subjects for 8 screenings that bring to life the entrance to the Foundation, inviting visitors to “look inside” – starting with the famous phrase by the engineer Luigi Emanueli, Adess ghe capiremm on quaicoss: andemm a guardagh denter (“Now we’ll understand something, let’s go and look inside”). One important aspect of the exhibition is the history of Pirelli advertising from the early 1970s through to the early 2000s, which is illustrated by thousands of printed advertisements made by leading agencies and famous designers. A study of the various materials and audio-visual supports, from film to slides, through to digital files, reveals an incessant interaction between advertising and cinema in Pirelli’s video campaigns. These are re-interpreted in a multimedia format using a site-specific video-installation in the Foundation’s Open Space area. The same exhibition area also includes a timeline with the history of our company, a selection of original historical advertisements, and a whole range of other content waiting to be discovered. But the restyling of the Foundation does not end here: also the Historical Archive has been given a new look with a display of illustrations, photographs, and objects from our company heritage. These include the famous Meo Romeo, the toy cat in reinforced foam rubber created by Bruno Munari, and the tyre that covered 17,000 km in the Peking-Paris race way back in 1907. The iconic photo by Luca Comerio, which in 1905 forever captured the workers outside the first Pirelli factory, greets visitors to the Archive in its new-look version, after the recent restoration. The new display at the Archive also includes Carnak, an oil painting on canvas by Renato Guttuso, an advertisement by Renzo Bassi for the Superflex Stella Bianca tyre, and a large lithograph dated 1913, which now stands out in the area of the Archive devoted to original drawings by those artists who, over the years, have helped make our “Long P” logo famous and recognised throughout the world.

So now it’s time to come and visit the “new Foundation”. We look forward to seeing you!