Sunday, 3 March: The Pirelli Foundation will be participating with guided tours and workshops for children in the third edition of MuseoCity, an event promoted by the City of Milan.

“Pirelli, a Story of Innovation and Passion: Rubber, Technology, Work, and Environment”, is the title of the guided tours that will take visitors on a journey of discovery, through images and personal testimonies, to find out about almost a century and a half of processes, raw materials, and sustainable products. A story of people, of machines, and of research, in which human ingenuity encounters nature to find innovative materials and production processes that are ever more respectful of man and the environment. From the Pirelli Headquarters, built around the historic cooling tower of the old Bicocca factory, to the Pirelli Foundation – with its precious images and artefacts that testify to the company’s sustainable, environmental and social culture – by way of the fifteenth-century Bicocca degli Arcimboldi, with its Leonardesque overtones.

Entrance: Pirelli Headquarters, Via Bicocca degli Arcimboldi 3, Milan

Guided tours (about 1 hour and 30 minutes):

10 and 11 a.m., 12 noon, and 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 p.m.

Booking required, on a first-come, first-served basis. Please click here.

We have two events for children aged from 6 to 10, with a workshop and a guided tour under the title “Earth, Air, Fire, and Water… Natural Elements for the Best Tyres”: from the rubber collected from a tree to the energy produced by water and air, to fire that gives it form and shape. On a tour that starts from the cooling tower of the old Pirelli factory, young visitors will find out how these natural elements are part of a process that ultimately leads to the creation of a new tyre. Following this incredible recipe, it takes just some simple experiments to see how important nature is in creating innovative products and rubber objects, and how essential it is to respect it.

Subject to booking, parents can take part in the workshop activities at the Pirelli Headquarters, in the guided tour entitled “Pirelli, a History of Innovation and Passion: Rubber, Technology, Work and Environment” or feel free to visit the exhibition of historical and audio-visual documents devoted to Pirelli’s culture of sustainability.

Entrance: Pirelli Headquarters, Via Bicocca degli Arcimboldi 3, Milan

Teaching activities (about 1 hour and 15 minutes)

First session at 11 a.m., second session at 4 p.m.

Booking required, on a first-come, first-served basis. Please write to visite@fondazionepirelli.org

“I was born in Via Jan in 1931. My grandfather Francesco had commissioned Piero Portaluppi to design our house. The care with which he did the job shows what a close understanding the two of them had in inventing this wonderful home, one of the architect’s most sophisticated works.”

This is how Alessandro Mendini recalled the house where he was born, which his grandfather Francesco Di Stefano had built as a home for his whole family. It was here that he started building up an important collection of paintings that has since made his home, Casa Museo Boschi Di Stefano, one of the most interesting contemporary art museums in Milan. Di Stefano’s daughters Fulvia and Marieda lived here with their husbands, Vincenzo Mendini, who was Alessandro’s father, and Antonio Boschi. On the website of the Casa Museo Boschi-Di Stefano, Mendini continues: “In those days, Uncle Boschi had not yet become a top manager at Pirelli and a tireless inventor of ‘rubber-iron’ patents. He was still a young graduate who, with the full backing of his wife, would make any sacrifice to go to galleries such as the Milione, so that he could take home a small Carrà or a little statue by Arturo Martini.” Engineer Antonio Boschi joined Pirelli in 1926 as an employee in the Rubber Technology Department, where he spent his career, being promoted to important positions in the sector of miscellaneous items.

The family ties between Mendini and Boschi led Sandro to create some advertisements for Pirelli, which were published in Pirelli: Rivista d’informazione e di tecnica in 1958. He was still a student at the time (he graduated from the Politecnico di Milano University in 1959), working in an architectural firm together with Mario Brunati and Ferruccio Villa. The advertisement studies were signed by the firm but actually conceived and created by Mendini: five advertisements for various products, ranging from underwater fishing articles to hot water bottles, through to the Cinturato and the Rolle. These were the most successful Pirelli tyres at the time, and he used a humorous take on their shapes and tread patterns to create amusing characters. The young and still unknown Sandro Mendini, who had grown up surrounded by the paintings of Sironi, Funi and Casorati, made his contribution to the golden age of collaboration between the company, intellectuals, and artists. He worked alongside the great names of graphics and design who helped create the company’s corporate image and advertisements under the direction of Arrigo Castellani. The Pirelli Foundation met Mendini while work was under way on A Muse in the Wheels. Pirelli: A Century of Art at the Service of its Products (Corraini Edizioni, 2015). The book was the crowning moment of a project, which ran from 2011 to 2015, to recover and promote the collection of original sketches and drawings. The work of restoration, cataloguing and digitising the materials came after a meticulous study of the works, their authors, the circumstances in which they were made, and the client. The volume was acknowledged by Mendini himself during the presentation of the book at La Triennale in June 2015, where he appeared as a distinguished guest. Mendini praised it as “an incredible book, an extremely challenging cultural work of great documentary quality and methodological criticism”, bearing witness to “the impact of a company on the quality of society”. A work that has shed light on collaboration between Pirelli and one of the greatest Italian architects and designers of the twentieth century.

Pirelli has always maintained a constant dialogue between its cultural institutions and the city. After opening new company libraries in Bicocca and Bollate, it has entered into a partnership with the City of Milan with a view to incorporating the Bicocca library into the circuit of Milanese libraries.

We want to give a voice to those who made this project possible so that they can tell us how new areas of experimentation between local companies and public cultural entities can be created in Milan, a city that has made the fusion of culture and science a key trait of its personality.

The words of readers at our libraries also tell the story of what it means to have a space for books at the workplace and how finding time for reading improves the everyday life of a company, changing the approach to work and the perception of its spaces.

In the videos screened here, we show how a library can bring life to a company as a space of culture and innovation, but also of creativity and happiness.

Today sees the expansion of the online archive section of the Pirelli Foundation website with an important new series of documents. The complete browsable collection of Fatti e Notizie, the Pirelli house organ published from 1950 through to the present day, is now available to the public.

“This paper aims to solve the problem of providing all employees with periodical information about events and news concerning our organisation, adopting strict criteria and a precise format”: this was how the company magazine for Pirelli Group employees in Italy announced its own birth in issue number 1 in February 1950. It came at the height of the reconstruction period after the catastrophe of the war, which had seen the bombing of Via Ponte Seveso in 1943 and of Bicocca in 1944, the destruction of the factory in Tivoli, the Nazi occupation, and mass deportations. The company understandably wanted to restore its strong, cohesive identity and offer workers the hope of peace and lasting well-being, and Fatti e Notizie was delivered free of charge to the homes of all employees. “The cost of this paper will be handsomely repaid if it manages to help strengthen the ties between all those who work to make the company efficient.”

During its early years, the house organ published practical information, such as news about health care for employees, the activities of the Cultural Centre and the Sports Centre, and of the Library, as well as about scholarships for students and initiatives for the elderly. Then there were reports on various sectors of the company, important news about the life of the Group and about the latest products to reach the market. In other words, a series of small aspects that, once they were gathered together, began to create a single great world: that of a Group that, day by day, was becoming an integrated, global force. In a life spanning almost 70 years, Fatti e Notizie can be seen as an increasingly wide-ranging overview of an entire, rapidly changing society reflected in the events of the company. This was the same philosophy at the heart of Pirelli magazine, published from 1948 to 1972, which can also be viewed online on the Pirelli Foundation site.

As the years passed, the pages of Fatti e Notizie became glossy and colourful. As tastes changed, so did the format. The number of pages increased in order to keep up with the increasingly extensive and complex world of Pirelli. And the content changed too: after the impetuous optimism of the 1950s and ’60s, the paper did not back away from the great confrontational issues of the 1970s: employment, migration, women’s issues, and the environment. It promoted wide-ranging, unprejudiced investigations, and then took up the challenge of global institutional information in the 1980s and ’90s, with a close look at breakthroughs in information technology regarding the organisation of work.

The digital world of the 2000s was almost within reach. Today, Fatti e Notizie is still published in printed format and available to all employees. It is also available in a daily version – published on the company intranet – with the latest news from the world of Pirelli.

Entire generations of Pirelliani have seen themselves in the photos of athletes on the Pro Patria sports ground in Bicocca, in the smiles of children at the holiday camp in Pietraligure, or in workers’ overalls receiving the “suggestion box” awards for their inventions, which have helped make cars safer and more efficient. Fatti e Notizie has been – and still is – a means of bringing people together by sharing issues common to all workers. Leafing through it will be like going on a long journey through Italy as it was in the twentieth century. A journey that, then as now, sees us all by the side of a “Long P” that has become such a part of our lives.

InsideEdu is a video-interview project that gives a voice to the children and young people taking part in the educational activities of the Pirelli Foundation Educational programme. The video camera followed the students around during the courses – watching them visit the Pirelli Foundation and coming face to face with original documents, such as patents and advertising sketches, seeing them intent on participating in meetings with experts, and putting into practice what they have learnt by creating their own advertising campaigns or programming a robot and getting it to work. Their impressions and opinions have been gathered during the courses and can now be seen in this video – the first in a series – showing how they tackle the subject of innovation, which in recent years has become increasingly key to the business world, as well as to that of schools and education.

Pirelli has accumulated almost 150 years of history, research, and production, which means that its technological development model is an interesting example for young students, who increasingly need to deal with new technologies and with the capacity for innovation in companies. With over 6,100 patents registered since 1872, the company’s Research and Development laboratories continue to experiment, in order to create ever-more innovative high-performance products, but also with an increasingly watchful eye on sustainability and safety. In its Historical Archive, the Pirelli Foundation preserves records of this continuous research, in the form of technical charts and drawings, projects, studies and research into materials.

During the “Mechanical eyes, robots, and music for the digital factory” course, the presence of Pirelli engineers specialised in new tyre-production processes helped the students find out about the functions and potential offered by the Next MIRS automated robotic system and by Automatic Visual Inspection (AVI), which makes it possible to automatically detect any possible defects in the tyre. They were then able to build their own little robot and experiment with programming it.

What do young people expect from innovation and advances in technology? “Cities made of robots” and “machines that can perform tasks that make it possible to make life easier and have new experiences, without the need for human intervention” are just a couple of the answers that the young interviewees give in the video. It is therefore important to show them that even the use of new technologies and artificial intelligence requires human mediation, and to highlight the importance of developing skills that make it possible to work with intelligent machines. To make sure that schools, too, are prepared for an increasingly digital and connected future.

Today Pirelli celebrates its one-hundred-and-forty-seventh birthday: on 28 January 1872 Giovanni Battista Pirelli signed the deed of incorporation of the limited-partnership company G.B. Pirelli & C., in Milan. And yet the origin of the company also had international ramifications, for in March 1871, the newly graduated engineer Giovanni Battista travelled through the valleys of Switzerland and jotted down in his diary some aspects of the country he was visiting: “The institutions and the character of the people combine to protect and generate work. The manufacturer – the director – is active and diligent, and a friend of the worker, who is intelligent, industrious, and tractable… Capital and labour have found total agreement, and the beneficial consequence is harmony, love, and mutual assistance. There is much to learn from the institutions of these countries, and I hope that mine too may one day resemble it industrially.”

The Swiss Confederation was one of the countries, together with Germany, Belgium, and France, on Giovanni Battista’s “educational tour abroad”. His trip had been made possible by a 3,000-lire scholarship, awarded by the Milanese noblewoman Teresa Kramer-Berra, which he won as the best student on the industrial engineering course at the Politecnico University of Milan. He invested the money in a personal investigation of the Second Industrial Revolution, which was blossoming in some European countries, while still struggling to take off in Italy. The year-long “Grand Tour” was to help him learn how to become a modern entrepreneur, open to innovation. It seemed that the most innovative sector was that of rubber: in Genoa a few years previously, Giovanni Battista had seen the wreck of a sunken warship miraculously raised to the surface with the help of French tubes “in caoutchouc”. One of the key aims of his study trip was thus to learn about the German and French rubber industries: “I started out under this banner, but only for form’s sake, reserving the right to observe and study other things… I was interested in all industries alike.”

The engineer’s travel diary is packed with notes: sketches of mysterious machines used in weaving, meticulous descriptions of the production process of locomotives, layouts of the most advanced factories. However, the visit that proved to be decisive for his future as an entrepreneur came on 12 May 1871 in Berlin, when he visited the Voigt und Winde factory for rubber items. Rubber, at last! Because, as he had written a few weeks earlier to his friend Ettore Paladini, “after courting her in every possible manner, I’ve finally managed to have myself introduced to that bashful damsel that is the rubber industry. It happened in Mannheim. Introduction – four words – a quick tour of the rooms, and then I blurted out: I hope to see you again in Berlin.” And, after Berlin, he was in Gustave Luyckx’s rubber factory in Brussels, and then in that of Mr Casassa in Charenton, France: François Casassa reappeared in the history of G.B. Pirelli & C. as a partner, together with another Frenchman, Aimée Goulard, Pirelli’s first technical director.

Without making it over to England, the traveller returned to Milan in September 1871: it was now time to find partners prepared to get the idea off the ground. “The creation of a new industry as the brainchild of a romantic student” was the title later given to an article in Pirelli magazine.

“The Pirelli Cultural Centre came into being spontaneously in one of the company canteens, when some workers realised that what they had in common was not just work, an appetite, and a canteen, but also a series of pressing spiritual needs”. First of all, a need for knowledge: the knowledge that comes instinctively from the pages of books. This was the message conveyed by the article “Culture as a Staple”, written by Silvestro Severgnini, the director of the Pirelli Cultural Centre, for Pirelli magazine in 1951. In the 1920s, Pirelli had already provided its workers with a very special department in the factory, where books showed up alongside machines. A place where they could read, and share, and interact with culture. “The importance of reading in a person’s education has always been written into the company’s DNA. Today we have libraries in Settimo Torinese, in Bollate, in Bicocca and we are linked up to the entire Milanese Library System (SBM). This provides access to over a million documents, videos, magazines, newspapers, and books. We believe that reading is an important part of people’s lives and it is part of the relationship between Pirelli and culture that has always been at the heart of the open society in which Pirelli has its roots.” These are the words of Marco Tronchetti Provera, CEO of Pirelli and President of the Pirelli Foundation. The Pirelli Foundation now manages this network of company libraries, which – together with the SBM project – expands the range of cultural opportunities in a virtuous circle with public institutions. Libraries are also a place for meeting and coming together at the workplace, and a powerful incentive to interact with the world around us: a book in the company is a passport to an idea of welfare that is as time-honoured as it is relevant today. “What’s great is that innovation in Pirelli is not just in its core sector, which is of course technological, but it is also linked to a new way of approaching work methods and spaces. This too is innovation,” says Davide Sala, Executive Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer. “Business and culture not only coexist, but they nourish each other in a way that is increasingly beneficial.”

Perhaps not everyone knows that Umberto Eco’s famous Phenomenology of Mike Bongiorno – which in 1963 became part of the Misreadings collection – first appeared in 1961 in Pirelli. Rivista d’informazione e di tecnica in an article entitled “Towards a Culture of Vision?”. It was part of a wider analysis of television and culture, one of the many cultural and social themes that were examined in the Pirelli magazine. It painted a portrait of the television presenter Mike Bongiorno, published at the peak of his popularity, at a time when viewers crowded into cafés to watch “Lascia o raddoppia”, the first major cult show on Italian television. Referring to Bongiorno, Ecowrote: “He does not provoke inferiority complexes, despite presenting himself as an idol, and the public acknowledge him, by being grateful to him and loving him. He represents an ideal that nobody need strive to reach because everyone is already at his level.” As an absolute icon of Italy’s economic boom, the Italian-American compere was “the most striking illustration of superman’s being reduced to everyman” capable of arousing empathy as the bearer of “an immediate and spontaneous allure that can be explained by the fact that he betrays no sign of theatrical artifice or pretence.”

Much has also been said of Eco’s role in the debate on the cultural evolution of comics in Italy. His reflections in an essay originally entitled “Apocalyptic and Integrated” of 1964 were taken up and examined by Eco himself three years later in the Pirelli magazine in “Meditations on a Balloon”: “When I published the semantic studies on the comic Apocalyptic and Integrated, the most supercilious critics asserted that one should not examine such frivolous subjects with the tools normally applicable to Kant.” On the massification of comics, he wrote: “The first scholars of this phenomenon used to gather almost in secret. […] Now, as is only right, theses on comic books appear in various university institutes, conferences are called and communications discussed…” He quotes the Corriere dei Piccoli and Topolino, by way of Cocco Bill, Diabolik, Crepax and Walt Disney. The texts are accompanied by wonderful Roy Lichtenstein lithographs.

“We were the comic-book enthusiasts. We worked mainly from memory. Few of us had collections at home. And those who did would not show them to the others. Or they didn’t know they had them. They only found them later, up in the attic. […] Now Linus has broken down the barrier. Comics are on the national stage now.” It is no coincidence that, after a brief editorial, the first issue of Linus in April 1965 opened with an interview with Elio Vittorini and Oreste Del Buono by Eco. One need only read the first question that Ecoasks Vittorini: “Today we’re discussing something we believe to be very important and serious, even though it may appear frivolous: Charlie Brown comic strips. Vittorini, how did you first come across Charlie Brown?” and one can see how this interview – together with the Meditations and the essay on the “Apocalyptic and integrated” – is actually a manifesto that elevates the comic strip to an acknowledged artistic and literary form.

Not just television and comic strips. Eco’s contribution to the debate on society and mass culture also included pungent reflections on established holidays, as in Protocol 00/03 Lighting Dossier, again in the Pirelli magazine, in 1962. The article reconstructs an ironic correspondence between the devils of Malebolge, who have been instructed to boycott Christmas: “… with that atmosphere of festivity and general benevolence that comes about at that time of year, Christmas celebrations promote cordial relations, for a few days putting international conflicts to one side, and leading people to perform absurd good-neighbourly actions such as giving gifts, doubling employees’ wages, and entering into civil conversations. Precisely in order to avoid these dangers, I asked your predecessor and I ask you now to prepare a master plan for the area of Milan, which we have chosen as a sample.”

And again on the subject of Christmas, in 1963, in a letter to his son: “And I will teach you how to play very complex wars, in which the truth is never on one side alone…” “But if by chance, when you grow up, the monstrous figures of your childhood dreams, with witches, kobolds, armies, bombs and mandatory military service still exist, who knows if you will not have acquired a critical consciousness with regard to fairy tales and if you will have learnt to act critically in the real world.”

Umberto Eco’s relationship with Pirelli went beyond the years when the magazine was published. For example, when interviewed in 2011 about the exhibition entitled Rubber Soul: Aesthetics and Technique in Step with Fashion curated by the Pirelli Foundation at La Triennale di Milano (21 June-24 July 2011), he said: “In this wholly intangible exhibition, one made of images, history and interpretation, we see not the portrait of fashion, but a portrait of the image of fashion. And it is precisely this that makes its representation so relevant today.” “…As we have already said, there are no objects, just representations, so as to shift our focus from the tangible aspect of fashion to the level of dreams. Indeed, fashion evokes and produces dreams, especially now.”

The latest book by Pierluigi Ciocca illustrates the links between the country’s economic crisis and cultural crisis

Understanding better in order to act better. It is one of the key principles of action for good business management but also for the entire economy. Without mentioning the need of every prudent manager as well as every good entrepreneur, to find out more in order to understand and then decide. It is for this reason that reading “Tornare alla crescita.Perché l’economia italiana è in crisi e cosa fare per rifondarla” (Back to growth. Why the Italian economy is in crisis and what to do to revive it), written by Pierluigi Ciocca and just recently published – is really necessary. A little over two hundred pages long in a small format but of great depth concerning the situation of the Italian economy, the path that led it here and on what should be done to make it emerge from the crisis that has its vice-like grip on it still.

The book is a collection of writings “variously dated and variously set”, which provide an account of the analysis conducted by Ciocca regarding the Italian economy. The work revolves around a consideration that applies to all the pages of the book: “Having been lively in the past, the Italian economy has been at a standstill for years. To contribute to this decline were: public finance, unbalanced; infrastructure, deteriorated; the legal system, inadequate; business dynamism, tarnished. Europe is not doing what it could. Culture, institutions, politics, last but not least civil society in the country are called upon to react, to cope. Only in this way will Italy be able to find the way for growth”. While this is the summary outlined by the economist, the same is facing an Italy with low productivity and high unemployment, a country that is succeeding only slowly in coming out of the recessions of 2008-2013 and that especially hides some fundamental problems: the public debt that irritates the financial markets; crumbling infrastructure; the right of the economy which is becoming obsolete; companies that fail to respond to the urgent need to invest and innovate, seize the opportunities of the digital revolution.

Ciocca writes about the history of the Italian economy in a plain, and comprehensible language, not without technicalities but always attentive to making himself understood. The limits of economic policy have had a massive influence, according to the author: the incomplete budgetary reform; the cutting of public investment; delays in the rewriting of the system; the insufficient competitive pressure on companies. Ever since the devaluation of the Lira in 1992, businesses are resting on the laurels of the easy profit forecast by a weak exchange rate, by wage moderation, by state subsidies, by the scandalous tax evasion.

So, what can be done? For Ciocca, an overhaul of the economy is vital to stop its regression. Starting with the Euro as the precious and indispensable currency. The author indicates a solution entailing seven moves. These are seven lines of action: from rebalancing the budget to a new strategy for the South of Italy, via public investment, a different European policy, distributive equalisation, a new right of the economy, and competition.

But Ciocca’s book is also distinguished by more. It is not only about the economy in crisis, because this has its roots much deeper than the economy, in the deepest layer of culture, institutions, the policy of the Belpaese. Culture and habits too, a way of understanding the common good. It is for this reason – especially, perhaps – that the literary work of Ciocca should be read and appreciated.

There is a beautiful quote by Carlo Azeglio Ciampi at the beginning of the book: “There is a growing conviction within me that the economic factor, albeit crucial, does not explain in full the nature of the crisis that we are still experiencing […]. It is to factors of a cultural nature – and if the adjective does not scare too much, of a spiritual nature – that we must look with lucidity and critical sense”.

Tornare alla crescita. Perché l’economia italiana è in crisi e cosa fare per rifondarla (Back to growth. Why the Italian economy is in crisis and what to do to revive it)

Pierluigi Ciocca

Donzelli, 2018

Speaking ill of journalists is an ever more widespread habit. Insulting them, treating them badly, scorning them. And threatening them. Going as far as forcing newspapers to close down by cutting government grants to their publishers (an idea from the 5-Star Movement component of the Government, without any discussion between publishers and journalists, and without any thought of an organic reform of the sector). Then comes news of a tragic event, the assassination at the hands of a terrorist of a young Italian journalist, Antonio Megalizzi. And all those who cherish culture and civility are driven to reflect upon his ideas and the words spoken every day through the Europhonica programme via the microphones of the radio station for which he worked in Strasbourg: Europe, democracy as a dialogue, the values which have inspired, and indeed across a thousand boundaries continue to inspire European integration. The ideals of a good journalist, precisely. Entirely the opposite of the vulgarities which run rampant through other media every day against the EU. If anything, an example of the attentiveness towards a civilised co-existence pursued untiringly, for a confrontation with other cultures humiliated by the revivals of racism, and for a democracy which is not simply reduced to a “push of a button”, to a vindictive consensus, or to the banality of a like. And for information as a means of searching for truth and responsibility.

The work of Antonio Megalizzi was a breath of fresh air of intelligence, in a quest to avoid “the night time of Europe”. An emptiness, its demise. In an attempt to prevent this, it might be useful to adopt the proposal of the rector of Trento University, supported by other Italian rectors, to give Europhonica a new life as a multilingual student radio network.

We know that Megalizzi possessed a solid, passionately European culture. He had extensively read the writings of the founding fathers of Europe, starting with the “Ventotene Manifesto” written by Altiero Spinelli and Ernesto Rossi. Also, Norberto Bobbio’s lesson about the relationship between liberal democracy, well-being and the construction of Europe. The chronicles of the experiences of the nine million youngsters who, during the thirty-year life of the “Erasmus” programme, have studied, experienced, and felt directly the fascination of a closely-woven system of relationships in Europe as a vast communal point of reference.

From a young journalist to a highly-experienced banker. There is an echo of the same basic values in the words which Mario Draghi, President of the ECB (European Central Bank), spoke a few days ago in a lectio magistralis at the Sant’Anna Further Education College of Pisa: about the past and present of Europe, a better communal destiny to be constructed in the face of the rhetoric of the sovereignists and in defence of the Euro, the currency for growth and for fairer social stability.

“This Europe – said Draghi, in front of an audience of students and teachers – was an exceptional response to a century of dictatorships, of warfare and of misery”. And the monetary union, “a necessary consequence of the single market”, has become “an integral part of the political project for a Europe united in freedom, in peace, in democracy, and in prosperity”. An indication which is also valid for the future, “whilst in the rest of the world the fascination for illiberal recipes and regimes is gaining traction”.

That’s the point. Responsible freedoms against the “illiberal regimes”, whose shadows are flickering across Europe itself, with the propaganda of the sovereignists, swathes of rhetoric, and zero efficiency in terms of the quantity and quality of economic and social development.

The Euro is twenty years old (it was born, as the common currency, at the beginning of January 1999, and began circulating effectively in the first twelve countries of the Union on 1st January 2002). It has survived through uncertainties and constraints, of which Draghi is well aware and which he attributes to “nationalistic policies” and “incompleteness” within the monetary union itself, which has nevertheless been a “success”. And a factor of stability. Also, notwithstanding the nationalistic propaganda, it has actually been the Euro which “has allowed various countries to reclaim monetary sovereignty, compared with the regime of fixed parities in force in the EMS”, the European Monetary System, given that “the relevant decisions of monetary policy were previously taken in Germany and are today shared by all the participant countries”.

What about leaving the Euro, as preached by sovereignist rhetoric which has long been dear to the hearts of the yellow-green Government, and a key principle of the electoral campaign of the League and 5-Star Movement even though it was subsequently side-lined? An error. Without any economic or social advantage whatsoever.

Draghi is a man of facts and figures: from the launch of the EMS the Lira was devalued seven times, between 1979 and 1992, “and whilst Italian productivity was lower than that of the 12-member Euro average and GDP growth was more or less the same, the level of employment stagnated” and cumulative inflation surged “to unsustainable levels”, to 223% compared with 126% for the 12 member states of the Euro. The Lira was therefore a factor of weakness for the economy. As for the growth during the Eighties, considered today as a positive factor by so many of the people who preach a return to the Lira, it is worth remembering that “it was borrowed on the back of indebtedness left to weigh on the shoulders of future generations”. As for the clamour for borrowing, here is another warning from Draghi: “The monetary financing of the public debt has not produced benefits over the long term”.

What we need instead are structural reforms, not unproductive public expenditure.

“Proud to be Italian”, is how Mario Draghi, the European banker, described himself, as he spoke with the students of the Sant’Anna College. Proudly Italian and European, is how Antonio Megalizzi felt. It is worthwhile keeping note of and upholding the memory of this rich and complex identity.