As it follows the 2018 Giro Ciclistico d’Italia Under 23 race – which ended with the crowning of the champion in the Pirelli White Jersey on Saturday 16 June in Cà del Poggio, in the province of Treviso – the “Stories from the World of Pirelli” section goes back in time to look at another great event devoted to young amateur cyclists on their way towards their great leap towards professionalism: the Gran Premio Pirelli. The brainchild of a former cycling champion, Alfredo Binda, the first Gran Premio Pirelli was held in 1949 and it was clear from its instant success that there would be others in the following years. “I’m forty-nine now and I’m one of the old-timers, but if I were thirty years younger, I can assure you I’d race in the Gran Premio Pirelli even on flat tyres”, said Binda in 1951 in one of the many interviews he gave to Pirelli magazine.

“The G.P.P. is just three years old, but it’s already a classic. I’d say it’s the Milano-Sanremo of amateurs.” Alfredo Binda had particular reason to be proud, considering that a good number of foreign cyclists were taking part for the first time in the Gran Premio that year. Moving further into the 1950s, the Gran Premio Internazionale Pirelli became the top race that all young cyclists in Europe aspired to. “There are so few occasions when we can pit our amateurs against those of other countries”, wrote Giuseppe Ambrosini in an article published in Pirelli magazine in October 1952, “that we can only be grateful to the great Milanese company for offering us such an important and magnificent opportunity.” The journalist stressed how most of the merit for this success was due to Commendator Arturo Pozzo, the sales manager of Pneumatici Pirelli and the “perfect director in terms of his managerial skills, always fired by a youthful sporting spirit”. It was he who, way back in October 1948, had asked Alfredo Binda to come up with a good idea to revive cycling after the dismal years of the war, saying that he – and Pirelli – would certainly give him their support.

On the evening of 10 October 1955, Arturo Pozzo died suddenly at the age of sixty-six. On the previous day, he had awarded Sante Ranucci his prize at the Velodromo Vigorelli in Milan as winner of the 7th Gran Premio Pirelli. The event was struck a terrible blow by the death of Pozzo, who had invented it seven years previously together with Binda, but another two races were put on, with the Arturo Pozzo Trophy designed by the architect-designer Roberto Menghi being awarded in the 1956 race. The final round of the 9th Gran Premio Ciclistico Internazionale Pirelli, held on 22 September 1957, saw the victory of a young Veneto cyclist, Federico Galeaz. The brains behind the Gran Premio Pirelli had been Arturo Pozzo, but the brawn was certainly the cyclist Alfredo Binda. The champion from Cittiglio – a little village in Valcuvia, above Varese – had the task of bringing to an end an era and, in an article entitled “Nine years with young people” for Pirelli magazine no. 6 of November 1957, he recalled that “the champions applauded by the public all come from the ranks of unknown amateurs: peasants, mechanics, apprentices, or just simple lads without a job but with a great passion for cycling… Amateurs still race without any prospects of immediate reward and, when they collapse from exhaustion, they quite simply remove their race number from their jerseys and go back home, riding hundreds more miles on their bicycles… But this year I saw a particularly combative spirit in all these young people. They have changed the face of our cycling rapidly, with their refreshing, youthful impetuousness.”

New technologies are not enough for the future of manufacturing

Industry 4.0 is easy enough to say.. But we also need to make it happen and, above all, to fill it with substance and with people. Without forgetting both the short and long term context where Industry 4.0 is being applied. In other words, this new industrial model should certainly be taken into consideration and implemented, but you shouldn’t stop there.

It is from this position that Sesto Viticoli has decided to write “Verso un manifatturiero italiano 4.0. Ricerca tecnologia e non solo” (Towards an Italian manufacturing 4.0. Technological research and much more besides). The meaning of the book is found in the sub-heading: “Technological research and much more besides”. Reasoning leads us to recognise that the manufacturing industry certainly has a central role to play in both advanced and developing economies and that its future can only be imagined in the form of the Industry 4.0 model.The problem, according to Viticoli, starts here.
The debate currently underway – as explained in the first pages of the book – is dominated by the importance of introducing digital technologies (IoT, big data, artificial intelligence, the cloud, advanced automation and so on) within company processes and organisations, as though a particularly technological asset alone would resolve all the problems and challenges, as well as deficiencies, which have accumulated in the Italian industrial system since before the beginning of the crisis.

For Viticoli, more is needed. And before anything else, we need to take a wider view of the situation in terms of possible developments. The book therefore begins with an analysis of “what’s happening in the world”, before moving on to ways in which to “build a future” and the available technological tools. The jump in quality soon follows. Viticoli examines the need for manufacturing companies to adapt to Industry 4.0, for training and the creation of business networks and for the capacity for technological transfers and the transformation of relations between the public and private spheres.

To support this, the author has collected a series of accounts from the FCA, Ericsson, Farmindustria, Fincantieri, LFoundry, Pirelli, Thales Alenia Space, Telecom, Cnr, Enea and Scuola Normale Pisa.

Viticoli’s book is important because it tells us about what’s happening now and above all because it looks at Industry 4.0 not as a magic formula but as an “evolution of a framework of already existing skills and culture to be re-drawn and finalised over a suitable time frame.”

Industry 4.0 as a path then, in which everything should be included, not only technologies. More cultural than technical.

Verso un manifatturiero italiano 4.0. Ricerca tecnologia e non solo (Towards an Italian manufacturing 4.0. Technological research and much more besides).

Sesto Viticoli

Guerini, 2017

The 2018 Giro d’Italia Under 23 officially started on 7 June, with the prologue in Forlì: this is the most important multiple-stage race in road cycling for amateurs. The white jersey of the leader was sponsored by Pirelli, and it could hardly be otherwise. Because the bond between Pirelli and cycling for the young dates back a very long way. It was in March 1949 when, in an article by Nino Nutrizio entitled “Amateurs on high alert” in Pirelli magazine, the cyclist Alfredo Binda proudly declared: “I’m in with the Gran Premio Pirelli – I’ve given my word and accepted the post.”

During that post-war spring, the great cycling champion, who had quit racing ten years previously and was about to become the Technical Commissioner of the Italian cycling team, had been hard at work going around Italy to organise the first Gran Premio Pirelli, “a gigantic cycling race for amateurs, with ten regional elimination rounds and a finalissima, with thousands of cyclists involved, and two and a half million lire’s worth of prizes”. But there was more, for each competitor was to be given three top-of-the-range Specialissimo Corsa racing tyres from Pirelli. Binda had got the idea long before from Arturo Pozzo, a top manager in the Tyres section of the Pirelli Group, receiving his wholehearted support. “As far as I’m concerned, I can say, without fear of contradiction, that the Gran Premio Pirelli is the authentic Italian Championship for Amateurs”, said Binda in an article entitled “New champions of the G.P. Pirelli”, which he himself signed for the magazine in July 1949.

This was the start of the first Gran Premio Pirelli, with local elimination rounds in ten regions in Italy. These races had “prizes and assistance, down to the smallest technical details”, recalls Nino Nutrizio again, in “The success of the G.P. Pirelli”, in the magazine that hit newsstands in November 1949. “The first five in each elimination round were duly invited to the test in Milan. And another 50 were given a chance to put themselves to the test in the repechage… On the morning of Sunday, 9 October, 120 amateurs lined up in the Milan Arena, waiting for the start of the finalissima”. They left Milan and headed for Treviglio, and then on towards the Varesotto: Varese, Tradate, Saronno and then back down towards Milan for the final sprint in the legendary Velodromo Vigorelli. And it can hardly be a coincidence that also the construction of the shrine of cycling in Milan was championed by Giuseppe Vigorelli, who long held the same position as Arturo Pozzo at Pirelli. The Gran Premio Pirelli of 1949 was won by the twenty-year-old Loretto Petrucci of Pistoia, racing for the Nicolò Biondo cycling club of Carpi: a young man who was not entirely unknown, since he had already been part of the Italian national team a couple of years previously. Petrucci’s career was not long but it was certainly intense, for he won the Milano-Sanremo twice on his Bianchi in 1952 to 1953.

The success of the 1949 Gran Premio Pirelli was also acknowledged by the – often critical – pen of the great journalist Nutrizio: “Pirelli is meritorious like no other for this policy, putting young people back on track. When will we see something like this also in other sports, which need to tap into the boundless breeding grounds of our people in order to find tomorrow’s champions?” “Like in sport in general, it’s a symbol of health and youth,” said Alfredo Binda in a flash interview published in Pirelli magazine no. 1 of 1950, “The Gran Premio Pirelli is a symbol of the future for the promising young talents of Italian cycling.” Right from the beginning, Binda himself had wanted the event to be called the Primo Gran Premio Pirelli – the first Pirelli grand prix – for he was convinced that others would follow, year after year. And indeed they did, for almost a decade.

22 July 2008: the “date of birth” of the Pirelli Foundation. Almost 10 years have gone by since our Foundation was incorporated. It was set up to preserve, promote, and make known the long history of the Pirelli Group. Since it first opened to the public in April 2010, the Pirelli Foundation has launched many projects, some of them in collaboration with other cultural institutions and organisations, such as the Piccolo Teatro di Milano and the Teatro Franco Parenti, the MITO SettembreMusica Festival, the Museo Interattivo del Cinema (MIC) and Fondazione Isec, to mention but a few.

Many of the activities of our Foundation start by analysing and processing the content of the company’s Historical Archive, which was already under the protection of the Sovrintendenza Archivistica per la Lombardia in 1972. It contains more than 3.5 km of documents and many works of art, including the preparatory cartoon by the famous painter Renato Guttuso for his mosaic Scientific Research, which was made by the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Ravenna, the stunning photograph by Luca Comerio of 1905, and thousands of advertising sketches, drawings and photographs. The Foundation preserves many objects that illustrate the close links between Pirelli, art, and design, such as Meo Romeo the cat and Zizì the monkey (winner of the first Compasso d’Oro in 1954), the foam rubber toys invented by the designer Bruno Munari, as well as Canestro, the innovative container designed by the architect Roberto Menghi, which is also on show at MoMA in New York. The same museum also has an advertising poster for Pirelli bicycle tyres by the artist Massimo Vignelli.

The Pirelli Scientific and Technical Library was added to the assets of the Foundation in 2010, with more than 16,000 volumes on the technology of rubber and cables from the nineteenth century to the present day. The holding includes foreign technical journals, of which Pirelli has the only copies in Italy, such as the British India Rubber Journal (1888) and the American India Rubber World. A campaign to recover, recondition and restore materials in our archive started in 2010: about 2000 documents on paper (including sketches, drawings, and printed advertisements), 90 transparencies, and the entire archive of films. We have also catalogued more than 15,000 documents and about 22,000 articles from Italian and international house organs, such as Pirelli magazine. With a view to making known this massive collection, in 2013 the catalogue of the Pirelli technical-scientific Library was included in the Sistema Bibliotecario Nazionale, and in 2014 an initial selection of documents, photographs, advertisements, and audio-visual materials was published on fondazionepirelli.org in the area devoted to the Historical Archive, and it is constantly being updated.

We have also prepared and curated many exhibitions that tell the story of the Pirelli style, starting with Un viaggio, ma… (2008), put on at La Triennale di Milano. In the spaces of the Foundation, in 2010, we presented About a Tyre, a photographic journey in collaboration with the New Academy of Fine Arts (NABA) in Milan. In 2011 we were back at La Triennale with Rubber Soul: Aesthetics & Technique in Step with Fashion, on Pirelli’s innovation in the world of fashion, which won the prestigious Red Dot Grand Prix in 2013. It Goes Like a Dream was another show in 2011, illustrating the history of Pirelli in motor sports. And then came the exhibitions Pirelli’s Industrial Humanism (2012), Pirelli and Italy on the Move 2013), Pirelli: A Winter’s Tale (2014) and Lunch Break: A Hundred Years of Italy at Table, at Home and at Work (2015), which illustrated the various aspects of Pirelli in history and in the present day. And, more recently: The Architectures of Industry (2015); Pirelli: Sustainable Culture (2015), a thematic journey through the evolution of the company’s sustainable management from 1872 to the present day, with a focus on research and innovation, and, lastly, Pirelli in 100 Pictures: Beauty, Innovation, Manufacturing, which opened in January 2017 in the Archimede civic library in Settimo Torinese.

In 2013 we launched the Fondazione Pirelli Educational project, a free programme for schools designed to introduce young people to Pirelli’s corporate culture. It puts on special courses that are renewed and expanded every year, ranging from the history and technology of tyres to corporate cinema, through to sustainability and robotics, photography, and the evolution of advertising graphics. About 14,000 students have taken part in our educational activities since 2013.

Over the past ten years we have also curated a number of publishing projects: Pirelli in 35 mm, two DVDs made between 2011 and 2012 to promote the company’s film assets; Voci del lavoro (2012, Editori Laterza), which tells the story of the transformation of the Pirelli industrial plant in Settimo Torinese and the creation of the new Industrial Centre, drawing on numerous oral sources. This led, also in 2012, to a play entitled La fabbrica e il lavoro, which was staged at the Piccolo Teatro in Milan. Between 2015 and 2017, the Pirelli Foundation, together with Corraini Edizioni, published two volumes devoted to the history of advertising and images produced by the Group in its over-140-year history: A Muse in the Wheels. Pirelli: A Century of Art at the Service of its Products (2015) examined the period from 1872 to 1970, while Advertising with a Capital P, which came out in July 2017, looked at Pirelli advertising from the 1970s to the present day. Our latest publishing project is Il Canto della Fabbrica [The Song of the Factory] (Mondadori), a book + DVD which relates the experience of the concert in September 2017 in the Settimo Torinese factory: from the origins of the piece of music commissioned by the Foundation from the violinist Francesco Fiore through to its performance by the Orchestra da Camera Italiana, conducted by Maestro Salvatore Accardo.

At 7 o’clock this evening in the Pirelli Headquarters in Milano Bicocca, we shall be speaking about it with Marco Tronchetti Provera, President of the Pirelli Foundation, the Mayor of Milan Giuseppe Sala, the Consulting Editor of Libri Mondadori Gian Arturo Ferrari, the President of the International MITO SettembreMusica Festival Anna Gastel, and the Director of the Pirelli Foundation, Antonio Calabrò. At the end of the presentation, the Orchestra da Camera Italiana, conducted by Salvatore Accardo, will perform “Il Canto della Fabbrica” for the guests at the event: a book, a concert, and a party to celebrate together “our first ten years”.

In the “Stories from the World of Pirelli”, which is devoted to the long tradition of television and movie commercials created by the Pirelli Group, we have already mentioned some advertising spots and films that have received honours and awards both in Italy and internationally. This was true of the animated film Novità al Salone Internazionale dell’Auto di Torino (“News from the Turin Car Show”) of 1951, made by the Pagot Film company to advertise the Pirelli Stelvio tyre. The ground-breaking cartoon received an award at the 2nd Advertising Congress in Genoa and received the Prime Minister’s Cup for Best Advertising Film at the 2nd International Advertising Film Festival.

This was just the start of a tradition of television and film commercials that went on to be awarded for their genius. In another story on the actresses who appeared on the covers of Vado e Torno magazine, which was published by Pirelli for the road haulage sector in the 1960s, we talked about the young Liz Allsop and the film The Tortoise and the Hare, in which she played the part of an English driver in a Jaguar going up the length of Italy on the Autostrada del Sole. It was 1966 and the medium-length film – produced by Cammell, Hudson and Brownjohn Associates and directed by Hugh Hudson – was the work of Pirelli Ltd in England. Adopting another innovative solution, it was a complete film, with the Pirelli Cinturato as its real star. Also The Tortoise and the Hare received a whole crop of awards, including those at the 7th International Industrial Film Festival and at the 4th International Trade Film Days in Milan in 1966, and the Clifford Wheeler Award in England in 1967, until it was broadcast later that year on Italian television.

Liz Allsop, the English blonde in The Tortoise and the Hare may have been relatively unknown, but Sharon Stone, the American blonde, was universally famous when, thirty years later, she starred in the 1993 TV commercial that became known as Driving Instinct. Fresh from her worldwide success in Basic Instinct, she played the part of Catherine Tramell, with her love of sports cars, in the Pirelli film commercial directed by Willy van der Vlugt. Here too the tyre was a discreet, though fundamental protagonist. And Pirelli reaped in more awards, with an Oscar at the Industrial Film Festival in Cernobbio and two first prizes given that year by the International Advertising Association. Further successes came in 1995, this time with the American sprinter Carl Lewis, who became Tyreman in Carl in New York, the commercial produced by the Young & Rubicam agency and directed by Gerard de Thame for Pirelli P6000 tyres. The slogan “Power is nothing without control” went on to become a universal symbol of Pirelli tyres and their performance. Awards soon came pouring in: the spot received the BTAA Commercial of the Year prize, three nominations for the D&D Award, and the Lion Award at the Festival of Creativity in Cannes. As we see in the Pirelli Foundation book Advertising with a Capital P, published by Corraini Edizioni in 2017, these really are stunning and controversial advertisements. And that is why they have been so adored by the public and critics alike.

Composing and performing music in a factory

Yesterday «four wails of a factory siren» of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Second Symphony for the factory from the early 20th century, evoking images of steel, noise, smoke, and the fatigue of the assembly line. Today the violin of Salvatore Accardo and the strings of the Orchestra da Camera Italiana for Il Canto della fabbrica to interpret the rhythms of digital manufacturing, computers and robots of the 21st century. An entirely different «civilisation of machinery» which has brought dramatic change to today’s people and factories with the advent of high-tech and the predominance of a “knowledge economy”. The music that tells this tale has also radically changed.

This book gives an analysis of these changes, and their contemporary representations through images, literature, industrial relations, and the new dynamics of manufacturing and corporate culture. 20th century factories continued to follow the same rationale that had characterised the previous century; operating according to a logic of production and mass consumption; they also had to mitigate conflict arising from these new dynamics. This model is no longer appropriate as the rules governing the manufacturing process have transformed over the past years due to profound scientific and technological innovation.

www.ilcantodellafabbrica.org

Edit by Fondazione Pirelli
Edizioni Mondadori
pages 323
illustrated edition
includes 1 DVD
Cod : 9788804702986

Published from 1948 to 1972, generally bimonthly, and on regular sale at newsstands, Pirelli magazine was launched with the declared aim of combining technical-scientific and liberal culture. The magazine published articles that ranged from art to architecture, through to sociology and economics, urban planning and literature. The journal was the brainchild of Arturo Tofanelli, who was chief editor until 1957 with Giuseppe Luraghi and Leonardo Sinisgalli. Its aim was to make the company’s technical and business culture part of the culture of society at large. After Tofanelli, the editor-in-chief was Arrigo Castellani, the “Propaganda Director” of Pirelli and, in the final years, Gianfranco Isalberti.

For over two decades the magazine was the forum for some of Italy’s most advanced cultural debates, with contributions by such great writers as Giulio Carlo Argan, Enzo Biagi, Dino Buzzati, Italo Calvino, Camilla Cederna, Gillo Dorfles, Umberto Eco, Arrigo Levi, Bruno Munari, Salvatore Quasimodo, Alberto Ronchey, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Elio Vittorini and many other great names of Italian culture, with articles and reports illustrated by artists of the calibre of Renato Guttuso, Alessandro Mendini, Fulvio Bianconi, Mino Maccari, and Ernesto Treccani.

Compared with other company house organs published in those years, Pirelli magazine was a case apart right from the first issues. This was especially apparent in its interest not only in poetry and literature but also in the figurative arts, and it soon became a benchmark for later company publications. The role of painters and illustrators in Pirelli magazine became increasingly important in the second half of the 1950s and in the first half of 1960s, but waned in the second half of the 1960s. This was when photography gained the upper hand, with celebrated photographers such as Ugo Mulas, Arno Hammacher, Federico Patellani and Fulvio Roiter, among others. The magazine’s focus on illustrations was partly a natural expression of the cultural climate in Italy, and particularly in Milan, from the 1930s to the immediate post-war period, when there was a close bond between artists and writers, industry and literature, art and advertising.

Under the pen-name Franco Fellini, also Giovanni Pirelli signed six articles in Pirelli: Rivista d’informazione e di tecnica between 1954 and 1959. The articles published in the February and April issues of 1959 were about a trip to Egypt that Pirelli went on with his friend Renato Guttuso. The idea was to document the construction of the Aswan Dam for a report to be published in the magazine. The first article, “Where the Nile is the only road”, tells the story of Giovanni Pirelli’s journey through Sudan and Egypt in December 1958. The second article, “The message of Seneb the Dwarf”, is about how Pirelli’s journey along the Nile continued, together with his wife Marinella and Renato Guttuso and his wife Mimise, at the beginning of 1959. The articles were illustrated by 16 drawings made on location by Guttuso, some of which are now preserved in the Pirelli Foundation.

Giuseppe Berta writes a book about the figure at the heart of every company

Who is an entrepreneur really? This is a crucial question in order to understand the nature of a company, i.e. the creature that comes to life thanks to the entrepreneur’s work. A body and an organisation, a set of machines and of lives, a company is plied to resemble the entrepreneur, and immediately thereafter the managers which he or she surrounds himself/herself with. It is a question of culture as well as technique. Today still, just as in the past.

The question about the nature of the entrepreneur is therefore an important and fascinating one. Some answers to this question were sought and found by Giuseppe Berta, who teaches Contemporary History at Bocconi University in Milan but who also boasts a lengthy collaboration with the Italian business system. In his “L’enigma dell’imprenditore (e il destino dell’impresa)” (The enigma of the entrepreneur and the fate of the enterprise), Berta tackles the issue first from a strictly historical point of view and then from a modern-day perspective. The story therefore begins  from the middle of the 18th Century, when the entrepreneur is represented as the engine of the economic process. So, pure classic economics, the evolution of which is followed with a plain and understandable – but not for this matter superficial – language. From the classic image of the entrepreneur, the author then moves on to the identification of more specific figures and to the identification of the entrepreneur with his capacity to innovate. Right up to the advent of the US  managerial  approach. Entrepreneur and manager went hand in hand for some time, explains Berta, and then changed again. With the spread of information and communication technologies, the issue of entrepreneurship went back to playing a key role. New figures of entrepreneurs – like Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk -, configure according Berta a “capitalism of platforms” that is under discussion today and that opens the way towards a new image of the entrepreneur himself/herself.

Berta recounts and analyses, placing the emphasis on one aspect rather than on another. It is a smooth read, which accompanies the reader along a short trip in terms of the number of pages, but one that is intense in terms of contents. A book about history and economics, the last literary production by Giuseppe Berta should be read carefully as it also opens up future reasoning. Indeed, right in the last few lines of the story, one reads: “For the moment, the fortunes of entrepreneurship depend on a world that is shaped, concurrently, by technologies, by the mobile boundaries of the international economy and by the excessive expansion of availability and of the financial circuits. A mixture that can apparently endlessly feed opportunities and the number of new entrepreneurs. But until when?”.

L’enigma dell’imprenditore (e il destino dell’impresa) (The enigma of the entrepreneur (and the fate of the enterprise)

Giuseppe Berta

Il Mulino, 2018