Lining up at the start of the 53rd Rally of the Azores, at 2 o’clock local time on 22 March 2018, was Tamara Molinaro in her Ford Fiesta R5 No. 19. A twenty-year-old from Como, and winner of the Ladies’ Cup in 2017, Tamara was but the latest in a long line of women drivers who have raced over the years under the Pirelli banner.

The first was Maria Teresa de Filippis, born in 1926, a Neapolitan countess. In a photo now in our Archive we see her, looking splendid as she dons her helmet in preparation for the start of the Stella Alpina race in 1949. Her car is a rare Taraschi Urania Sport, with BMW engine and Pirelli Stella Bianca tyres. A long-lost world.

Lella Lombardi is beaming, as always, in the picture that shows her before the start of the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1980, in the World Championship for Makes. We see her at the wheel of an Osella PA8 Group 6 of the Torino Corse team fitted with Pirelli P7: her racing partner is Mark Thatcher, son of the famous Margaret, then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. The race itself did not go that well, for Mark had an accident, but Lella Lombardi’s fighting spirit remained intact. Aged thirty-nine, she had an endless list of races behind her and still many more to come. But then she was, and still remains, the only woman to have notched up points in the Formula One World Championship, way back in 1975, in a March 751 at the Spanish Grand Prix.
Again in 1980, but this time on the rally course, with Pirelli and Fiat logos in the foreground for Michèle Mouton and Annie Arrii, the French crew in car no. 12 of the Fiat 131 Abarth/Pirelli team, at the start of the 48th Monte Carlo Rally. Michèle’s partnership with the two great Italian brands was crucial for her: not yet thirty, the driver from Grasse was well on her way towards a stunning career that would continue even after she retired from racing in 1986, for she held a number of positions at the top of the International Automobile Federation.

Making her mark in January 1978, in a photo for “Lella and Anna race with the P7”, an article in the Fatti e Notizie house organ devoted to women drivers in the world of Pirelli, is Anna Cambiaghi, a blonde twenty-seven-year-old from Milan. In actual fact, the photo dates from a few years previously, when she raced in an Alfa 2000 GTV together with Serena Pittoni in the 1975 Targa Florio, but she remained one of the queens of racing, from rally driving to speed racing, and even trucks. And to think that “she should have been an interpreter or a photographer”– but driving was the family thing, as it was for her brother Bobo. Another star began to shine in the firmament of international rally driving in those years: that of Fabrizia Pons from Turin, the navigator between 1981 and 1985 with the “première dame” Michèle Mouton in an Audi Quattro. She was an overnight success and one that was destined to fire up again a decade later, in 1996, when Fabrizia raced together with Piero Liatti in the Subaru Impreza 555 which, with its Pirelli P Zero tyres, triumphed on courses the world over. In 1997, the “reserve drivers” Liatti and Pons won the Monte Carlo Rally while the “first” Subaru team with the stars McRae-Grist was forced to pull out.

Just two letters in the surnames separate the ultimate in driving couples, together in both car and life: Anna Andreussi from Friuli and her partner Paolo Andreucci from Tuscany. With almost the same names, they were a force of nature, winning the Italian Rally Championship ten times, most recently in 2017 in a Peugeot 208 T16 Pirelli. When Paolo was just over fifty, and Anna a few years younger.

The story of certain companies representing examples of resilience in the face of the crisis has been published in a book

Companies and entrepreneurs who win also exist in Italy. And they are not only big names, but also almost unknown concerns who end up becoming the backbone carrying the entire national economy. Champions who are not unique but widespread, “common” even, of an Italian way of doing business with its own culture and its own way of understanding profit and social responsibility, which represent the same number of examples that perhaps should not be imitated blindly but certainly who can be a source of inspiration.

Filiberto Zovico went to look for some of these companies which manage to give large companies a run for their money – in terms of competitiveness . Starting with the observation that for these companies, the great crisis of 2007-2008 constituted an opportunity for strategic conversion, of processes and markets, and was not at all the final nail in the coffin.

After a short introductory part covering the theoretical framework and the methodology, the book tells the story of 12 businesses taken from the 500 companies who in recent years have grown with double-digit expansion rates. The reader thus peruses the stories of Co.Mac., Traconf, Brevetti CEA, Cattelan Italia, Manifattura Colombo, Comelit and GPS, Innova Group, Lurisia, Kask, Amer, Astoria, Bella Italia. Each company is characterised by a distinguishing trait, which helps us understand the “secret” to its success. They all share an extraordinary resilience and the capacity to learn also from the inevitable wrong choices that have accompanied the evolution of any company, they are concerns whose business models are proving effective even in presence of adverse factors. Their story is the most important part of the book.

But the written work of Zovico does not end here. Indeed, particular attention is paid to the challenges that these businesses and the reference institutions – political, educational and trade – will have to face in the coming years in order to turn this extraordinary entrepreneurial heritage into a real engine of recovery for the whole country.

Interesting is the preface by Dario Di Vico who focuses on two particular essential elements that emerge as conditions for success: the presence of “patient capital outside the owner families” and that of a “human capital” that is capable of accompanying these businesses.

Nuove imprese. Chi sono i champions che competono con le global companies (New businesses. Who are the champions who compete with global companies?)

Filiberto Zovico

EGEA, 2018

An all-female Pirelli in March 2018. We have talked about actresses as advertising endorsers, and about women writers. So we could now hardly fail to mention those women designers who, in the 1950s and ’60s, helped create a graphic style that is virtually unparalleled in the history of visual communication. Our story winds its way through two books, both of them edited by the Pirelli Foundation and published by Corraini Edizioni: A Muse in the Wheels (2015) and Advertising with a Capital P (2017). These two volumes examine and record the history of Pirelli advertising – the former from the late nineteenth century through to the 1960s, and the latter from the 1970s to the early 2000s. In other words, from the age of the draughtsman-painter who created a unique masterpiece to the age of infinitely reproducible computer graphics – from the “free thinker” artist to the supremacy of creative agencies. The designers we have chosen well reflect these two periods: Jeanne Michot Grignani on the one hand, and Christiane Beylier and Christa Tschopp on the other.

Jeanne Michot – an illustrator and costume designer who later married the designer Franco Grignani – was born to French émigrés in Ukraine. After the October Revolution in 1917, the family fled from Russia to western Europe, first to London and then to Paris and, lastly, to Italy. From the time she was a little girl, Jeanne had a passion for drawing, of fashion in particular. Together with her husband Franco, she worked on some of the great advertising campaigns for many important Italian brands: for Pirelli, Jeanne Grignani designed the supremely elegant collection of raincoats made by the Arona company from 1950 to 1955. The models and garments are rendered with soft, rapid brushstrokes: the beautifully feminine women wear garments with a wispy waist and raised collar, and trench coats with big sleeves. This was the fashion of the economic boom.

Then the boom busted and the very concept of creativity changed, as did the way of creating visual communication. The time had come for advertising agencies, who worked to precise briefings given by the companies. Pirelli had its own internal agency, which it called Centro, with a stream of graphic designers of the new era. The collection of images in Pirelli Advertising with a Capital P, which also examines the work of the Agenzia Centro from the late 1960s, starts with graphic works once again with a “feminine” take. 1966 was the year when the designer Christiane Beylier gave an instant perception of the global reach of the Pirelli Group – showing how it was multi-national and multi-product, and able to work in a variety of sectors – playing with the pliability of the company logo. The Long-P symbol allowed her to experiment with a play of duplications and projections that she used to give almost living form to the company’s various activities: from the refractivity of the “products for the home” to the geometries of “tourism and sport”, through to the concentric circles of the shipping sector and the yarn-effect of products for the textile industry.

Then Pop Art reached its height: experimenting with the universal language of signs that found its place in advertising campaigns made up of countless Pirelli logos, as imagined by Christa Tschopp for Agenzia Centro in 1970. The dawn of the Computer Age was breaking.

A book edited by the Agnelli Foundation provides an updated and detailed snapshot of the meaning of one of the fundamental components of manufacturing culture and the good life

A prudent company looks after the skills of its workers. It is a question of balance but also of the environment, of production efficiency and mental cleanliness. A mandatory passage toward effective management of production organisation, the competences passage is a far from obvious and clear passage. To start with the very definition of competence, moving on to its application and implementation in work environments. “Le competenze. Un mappa per orientarsi” (Competences. A guidebook), abook which was recently published by the Agnelli Foundation, precisely helps understand this part of business management and culture.

The team of researchers who addresses the topic of competence started their work with the observation that “competence” is a recurring concept in everyday language as well as in scientific, political, and professional debates, yet one which so far has not undergone any precise semantic coding. The book – approximately two hundred pages long – explores not only the concept itself but also the uses and the meanings of the term in different disciplinary sectors, in school systems, in the field of management and of human resource management.

The volume – edited by Luciano Benadusi (formerly full professor of Sociology at La Sapienza University) and by Stefano Molina (research director at the Agnelli Foundation in Turin) –, thus begins with the answer to a simple question: “What are we talking about when we talk of competences?”. It then continues with a second chapter which addresses more closely the definitions of competences, then moves on to investigate first the concept in its applications linked to the labour market and then in the context of educational systems and training. From the middle of the book onwards, on the other hand, the approach changes from a national to an international level and returns to a specific point: the relationship between competences and schooling in Italy. Indeed the focus – a commendable one – on the links between growth of competences and training-schooling system, then constitutes the actual heart of the conclusions of the book.

The research work by the Agnelli Foundation work group sometimes does not make for easy reading but it is certainly worth reading for anyone who wants to understand more about the fate of people in businesses and in society. The message which is given at the end of the book is loud and clear: “The topic of competences is destined to accompany us for a long time yet. Whether it is to provide adequate responses to concerns about employability in the medium-long term expressed by families and by businesses, or to build a solid foundation for a truly active and responsible citizenship, or for a development based on sustainability criteria, they will continue to be the subject of a dutiful attention on the part of the educational systems. This is because thinking about competence means, ultimately, asking ourselves which direction we want the future of work and the future of democracy to take”.

Le competenze. Una mappa per orientarsi (Competences. A guidebook)

Luciano Benadusi, Stefano Molina (edited by)

Il Mulino, 2018

Women and words: the signatures of women whose writings appeared, over the years, in the pages of Pirelli magazine, a publishing phenomenon that left a profound mark on the culture of the 1950s and 1960s. The first name was that of Milena Milani, an author from Savona, who shot to fame in 1964 with her La ragazza di nome Giulio, a novel that was banned for “offence against public decency” when it dared to talk of teenage turbulence caused by a bathing costume in Lastex. In Pirelli magazine no. 2 of 1950 her article was entitled “Ernesto, a Man. Hevea, a Plant”. The same costume was to be worn shortly after by Marilyn Monroe, the American goddess of femininity. And Fernanda Pivano took us to America in no. 6 of 1953: no one better than her could talk to post-war Italy about “America’s colossal reforming dream”, from Sherwood Anderson to Francis Scott Fitzgerald and John Steinbeck. The age of Jazz and of the Great Depression, of railways and strikes, settlers and – of course – Marilyn. But Lastex swimwear was soon back, in Gianna Manzini’s “Women by the Sea” in Pirelli magazine no. 4 of 1956. Women “who feel their power to be absolute, who are free, who put to one side their daily duels along with their daily victories”.
Armanda Guiducci gives us a critical look at modernity in no. 6 of 1960. In “‘Architect’ Stores”, the Neapolitan writer looks at the then-growing phenomenon of large-scale retailing, entering “into the heart of the problem of consumerism, in which, after needs have been satisfied, the idea of the useful is increasingly associated with that of pleasure”. The fame of La mela e il serpente was still fifteen years in the future, but in Pirelli magazine Guiducci was already showing her wisdom as a philosopher and sociologist.

The Cinturato, the revolutionary Pirelli tyre, burst onto the scene in 1966. It was given enduring fame in the film The Tortoise and the Hare, declared to be “extraordinary” by the driver Juan Manuel Fangio, and to be driven “with eyes closed” in the vision of the illustrator Riccardo Manzi. The subject of the never-ending “A journey but”, by the creative couple Arrigo Castellani and Pino Tovaglia – the former the first director of Pirelli magazine, and the latter the famous Italian designer. Puns and plays on words written in black and white polygons alluded to events and personalities in 1960s show business: it was an exercise in gossip that turned into advertising. Camilla Cederna could not fail to sense its real significance, in an article published in no. 4 of 1966: “You think it’s Orsetta?”, “So who’s the bed designer?”, and so on, in a whole series of associations and references to be interpreted, such as “the brunette Fiamma”, “ Italy’s most beautiful Silvia”, “the pale para-intellectual”. The genius that was Arrigo Castellani once again “got it right”.

Towards the end of the Golden Sixties, Lietta Tornabuoni wrote “PPP” (magazine no. 11-12 of 1968) devoted to Pier Paolo Pasolini. These were the years when the film Teorema was confiscated and Pasolini stated that “I’ve spent my life hating the old bourgeois moralists, and now I already have to hate their children too”. And Tornabuoni, in the magazine would write: “The more provocative and challenging Pasolini becomes, the more his audience expands. The more he is surrounded by the scandalised lamentations of the bourgeois world, the more he becomes marketable and marketed.”

For the first time, Fondazione Pirelli Educational is coming to Tempo di Libri, the international publishing fair that will be held at fieramilanocity from 8 to 12 March. The Foundation’s teaching programme includes workshops for students aged between 6 and 18, with creative activities for families.

The Fair will also give children and young people and their parents an opportunity to find out about Pirelli magazine, a periodical of culture and technology published from 1948 to 1972 with the aim of combining technical and scientific matters with humanistic issues. Great names from the world of science and literature appeared in the pages of the magazine – from Italo Calvino to Salvatore Quasimodo, Umberto Eco and Eugenio Montale – as well as painters and illustrators of the calibre of Renato Guttuso and Mino Maccari. Contributions by Bruno Munari were published along with Riccardo Manzi’s amusing cartoons on automation and the colourful advertisements by Giacinto Mondaini, the father of the actress Sandra, as well as those by a very young Alessandro Mendini.

The writers and journalists who contributed to the historic magazine also included Dino Buzzati, who wrote eight articles between 1949 and 1970, revealing his love of the mountains, his childhood fantasies and the curiosity of his teenage years, and his interest in scientific discoveries.

Dino Buzzati and his writings will be the starting point for many of the activities. His “Little Stories of a Skyscraper”, which appeared in the magazine in 1970, ten years after the construction of the Pirelli Tower, will be the stars in the creative trail on the first day, which is designed for primary and second-level secondary school pupils. Listening to his words, the children will be able to imagine the architect Gio Ponti, the interiors of the “Pirellone”, the stunning views from the top floors, and the ghost of the founder Giovanni Battista Pirelli, thus observing the profound changes that have swept through the city of Milan and its skyline.

The second course, for primary schools, called “Dino Buzzati and the Martians, and the Discovery of Rubber”, quotes from an article the author wrote for Pirelli magazine in 1957, in which he takes us into the science-fiction world and, with a great sense of humour, illustrates the modern uses of rubber.

Taking up the example of “Dino Buzzati’s Reasons Why”, a column the author wrote for some years in the Corriere dei Piccoli, the students will play a card game to discover the origins of rubber, the ingredients and characteristics of a tyre, and details about the Industrial Centre in ​​Settimo Torinese. And they will come up with their own new reasons why.

The 2018 Oscar awards for motion pictures were handed out on the night of 4 March. Only a few famous actresses – some of them with links to the history of Pirelli – have had the opportunity to win these prizes. Pirelli actually worked with great names such as Paola Borboni in the early years of the twentieth century. She never won the prize, however, partly because she preferred theatre to cinema, but also because she was famous before the Oscars were even invented. Indeed, she referred to herself as “the first actress of the century”, for she was born on 1 January 1900. She was twenty-seven when the painter Mario Bazzi portrayed her for an advertisement for Pirelli Hevea galoshes. Already a lively and unconventional star, she showed off the magical rubber overshoes that would protect her precious footwear from the rain. She was, however, only the first in a long line of actresses who have appeared in Pirelli advertisements over the years.

In December 1950, Lucia Bosè was not yet twenty but she was already famous. She had won the Miss Italia contest three years previously and had already been directed by Michelangelo Antonioni: a star on a flight to success. Everything she touched automatically became classy and desirable. Like the Pirelli suitcase in Vinilpelle, an artificial leather, that the actress promoted on the back cover of Pirelli magazine no. 6 of 1950, in a photo by Federico Patellani.

In 1952, at the age of twenty-six, Norma Jean Baker had already had a turbulent life and, more than anything, a tough time achieving success in the cinema, but in the end she had become Marilyn Monroe. She was the “blonde bombshell”, mid-way between the unfortunate Norma Jean and Marilyn the star, who smiled on the beach in the photo for the 1952 advertisement for Pirelli Lastex swimming costumes. The magical Italian-American elastic thread was worn by the actress who, more than anyone else, was to represent the ideal of beauty in the history of cinema.

More than forty years would go by before another splendid blonde film star would appear in Pirelli advertisements. The year was 1993 and the star was Sharon Stone, Catherin Tramell in Basic Instinct, who the previous year had wowed audiences around the world. In the Pirelli spot – “If you’re going to drive, drive” – the American actress comes down from the plane and lightly touches a Pirelli tyre as she gets into the car: the video instantly became “Driving Instinct” for everyone.

The Oscar went to her, to Sophia Loren, the first actress to win the famous statue in a film that was not in English. Even though she never posed as an endorser for Pirelli advertisements, it was she who appeared on the covers of Vado e Torno magazine in the 1960s, and then returned as a protagonist, looking magnificent at seventy-seven, in the 2007 edition of the world-famous “The Cal”.

How could the greatest names in the cultural debate be brought together in one place – people like the author-director Mario Soldati, the painter Renato Guttuso, the photographer Ugo Mulas, the engineer Pierluigi Nervi and the architect Gio Ponti? All it took was a couple of issues of Pirelli magazine in 1961, the year when Italy celebrated its Unification.

“See You in 2011” was the article published in issue no. 4, in August 1961. This was a photo reportage from Italia ’61, the International Labour Exhibition in Turin that told the story of the country’s first century, united under the banner of cooperation and commitment. Most of the photos are in black and white, showing a Turin Expo “with no pushing or shoving, without that strange atmosphere in which confusion, weariness, noise, and a great desire to see things becomes cheerful elation.” The author of the report was Ugo Mulas, the first of the great names who would come together in the pages of the Pirelli magazine devoted to the event in Turin. This was the time when the collaboration between the Lombard photographer and the historic company magazine was just beginning: the photos of Turin ’61 came just a few months after his reportage on Rome of the 1960 Olympics. From then on, Mulas’s picture stories roamed far and wide, from rubber plantations in Brazil to the sculptor Thomas Moore’s journey into marble, to illustrations for Vittorio Sereni’s articles through to his portrait of the artist Lucio Fontana.

One of Mulas’s photos for “See You in 2011” is a striking one in lively colours: the photo of a mosaic on display in the Pirelli pavilion at the Expo. And here we have the second great name: that of the painter Renato Guttuso. It was his drawing of La Ricerca Scientifica, which was used by the master mosaicists of the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Ravenna to create the mosaic for Italia ’61: “a dramatic summary of man’s long journey to understand nature and its laws”. Today, this great mosaic and its preparatory cartoon are in the spaces of the Pirelli Foundation in Milan, together with other sketches and drawings that Guttuso made in 1959 – also for the magazine – to illustrate the travel diary in Egypt with Franco Fellini, the pseudonym of the writer Giovanni Pirelli.

The cover of issue no. 4 of 1961 of Pirelli magazine was taken from another photo by Mulas: one of the unmistakable columns of the Palazzo del Lavoro in Turin, which was home to Italia ’61. And here we have another two illustrious personalities: the engineer Pier Luigi Nervi and the architect Gio Ponti. Nervi put his name to this symbol of the Unification of Italy in Turin, while Gio Ponti had worked with him the previous year on another symbol of Italian modernity: the quintessentially Milanese Pirelli Tower. Both of them, Nervi and Ponti, would entrust their ideas about architecture to the pages of Pirelli magazine a number of times: from the engineer-architect Nervi’s “The Art of Building” and “Resistance by Form” to Gio Ponti’s “An Architect’s Experience” and “The Perpetuity of a Building”. The last of these was written to celebrate the tenth anniversary of his vertical jewel, also known as the “Pirellone”.

In the last issue in 1961 of Pirelli magazine, we find “Italian Memorandum”, with the subtitle: “What I learned while working at the Exhibition of the Regions at Italia ’61”. Another famous name: Mario Soldati. The eclectic writer-director-journalist from Turin had been entrusted with organising the “Exhibition of the Regions”, as an integral part of Italia ’61, with the aim of facilitating the adoption of the new form of administration. This collection of top-name opinions for an Italy of almost sixty years ago is possibly a memorandum that is just as applicable to Italy today.

Cinema & History – Training and refresher course for teachers 2017/2018

Thanks to the collaboration between the Pirelli Foundation, Fondazione ISEC and Fondazione Cineteca Italiana, the Cinema & History refresher course for teachers, which is now in its sixth edition, combines historical analysis and an in-depth examination of the present with workshop courses and film screenings.

After the first two lectures at Fondazione ISEC on contemporary geopolitical issues and the new frontiers of work, the course went to the heart of the debate on the various themes in a meeting at the Pirelli Headquarters. The teachers were welcomed into the auditorium inside the former cooling tower, where they retraced the history of the Milan-based company, looking at documents and pictures from the Pirelli Historical Archive, which has undergone great transformations since 1872.

To promote direct experience of today’s production systems, the professors were invited to visit the Modular Integrated Robotized System (Next MIRS) production plant in Bicocca. The MIRS robotic process and its second generation, Next MIRS, allows for the customisation and diversification of the product in order to meet market requirements. These include special ultra-high performance tyres required by prestige brands, and custom tyres with coloured sides, which could not be made – and would not be economically sustainable – using traditional production processes.

The course will continue over the coming weeks with the screening of the films King of the Belgians by Peter Brosens and Mum’s Wrong – Maman a tort by Marc Fitoussi at the Museo Interattivo del Cinema, with a lecture on global finance and the real economy, as well as Fondazione ISEC and Fondazione Cineteca Italiana workshops.