All the staff of the Pirelli Foundation wish you Happy Holidays and a wonderful start to the year, and look forward to seeing you on 7 January 2016.

2015 has been an exciting year with lots of events and great satisfaction, and we thank you for sharing many of these times together with us. One event was the presentation of the book A Muse in the Wheels. Pirelli: A Century of Art at the Service of its Products (Corraini Edizioni) at Triennale Milano: a moment to celebrate a great chapter in the history of graphics and design. Another was the exhibition of Italian know-how and iconic cars and motorcycles bearing the “Made in Italy” label at Expo 2015, where historical images illustrated 143 years of Pirelli manufacturing excellence. Then there were conferences and seminars, including the annual conference for business archivists of the Business Archives section of the International Council on Archives, (ICA/SBA), which was devoted to “Creating the Best Business Archive”, and Orientainsegnanti on “active teaching methods” in “Didattica attiva: L’alternanza cambia la didattica”, organised by Confindustria at the Auditorium of the Pirelli Headquarters.

More than 2100 students from schools of all grades took part in the workshops of Pirelli Foundation Educational and 7000 people visited the Pirelli Foundation to see the documents in the company’s Historical Archive. Also the “animated” guided tours drew big crowds, with over 500 visitors, when they were put on during the Business Culture Week.

Thank you all for your participation – come with us again in 2016!

Best wishes to you all.

On Wednesday 18 November 2015, the Autditorium in the Pirelli Headquarters was the venue for the Orientainsegnanti conference entitled “Active Teaching: Alternation Changes Teaching”, organised by Confindustria with the collaboration of Assolombarda and the Ufficio Scolastico Regionale per la Lombardia.

The decision to host the event is part of Pirelli’s commitment to supporting the training of young people for the future development of Italy, well aware of its role in promoting scientific and technical education but also of the humanities in the broadest sense of the term.

The event allowed for a joint reflection on the role that teachers play in the process of innovating teaching and promoting ways of alternating school and work.

At the end of the conference, the many participants were able to visit the former cooling tower inside the Pirelli Headquarters, the fifteenth-century Bicocca degli Arcimboldi, and the company’s Historical Archive at the Pirelli Foundation.

Milan, 16 November 2015

Saturday 14 November witnessed huge visitor numbers for the animated guided tours around the Pirelli Foundation, the Bicocca degli Arcimboldi, and the former cooling tower, which were opened specially for the 14th Corporate Culture Week, the theme of which this year is “The company goes on stage”.

At each stop, professional actors played the part of characters linked to the history of the places, bringing to life the guided tour with their incursions. With Ettore the mechanic, visitors were thus able to relive the legendary Peking-Paris of 1907, working life in the 1950s inside the former cooling tower through the tales of the stoker, a typical day in the fifteenth century out in the countryside in the company of the court musician, and they ended up taking part in the creation of advertisements in the “Propaganda Pirelli” department in the 1960s.

Thursday 8 October 2015 sees the opening of the exhibition of images of the objects that made the history of the “Made in Italy” label – and the history of Italian culture and society.

The exhibition is entitled The Great Game of Industry: 50 + 1 Objects that Made the History of Italian Enterprise and is organised by Museimpresa – the Italian Association of Museums and Business Archives – with the patronage of Assolombarda. Curated by Francesca Molteni, the show retraces the history of Italian industry in 50 objects + 1 (the fifty-first being the flying shuttle, invented in 1733, and a symbol of the Industrial Revolution), chosen from the collections of the archives and museums associated with Museimpresa.

The objects include the Pirelli Cinturato, the tyre created in 1952 after years of research and studies, the first with a radial carcass, termed “extraordinario!” by the famous Argentine driver Juan Manuel Fangio in 1965. The Cinturato helped revolutionise the automotive world and the way we travel. It was an Icon of the “Italy on the move” of the 1960s, and the focus of the most famous advertising campaigns by artists such as Bob Noorda, Riccardo Manzi, and Pino Tovaglia. It was immortalised in Ugo Mulas’s photo shoots.

The new workshops for upper and lower primary and secondary schools for the 2015-2016 school year are now available online in the special section devoted to Pirelli Foundation Educational.

The new programme includes a series of workshops on the issues of sustainability and road safety. Leafing through the lavish programme we also find Cinema & History, a series of meetings and screenings for teachers.

See the complete programme in the Related Content section or visit the page devoted to each individual workshop.

All the courses are about two-and-a-half hours long and are held at the Pirelli Foundation.

For reservations, see the updated calendar on the online pages of the individual workshops.

For further information, please write to scuola@fondazionepirelli.org or call +39 0264423971.

The Pirelli Foundation has contributed to the Pirelli Health, Safety, Environment (HSE) week for employees with an installation entitled Lunch Break: A Hundred Years of Italy at Table, at Home and at Work on the subject of nutrition and health, focusing on the history of the company’s canteens, holiday camps, and company food stores.

With documents from the Historical Archive, the exhibition tells a whole range of stories, from that of the first refectory set up in 1915 in the Pirelli factory in Milano Bicocca to the construction of the canteen for employees in the Milan factory in 1924, through to the first self-service diner designed for the Bicocca plant in 1956.

The visitors are greeted by a very special table “set” with anecdotes about the changing habits of the Italians, from food and drink to their tastes in music and cinema, television and graphics, household appliances and furnishings, which have all evolved over the years, together with Italian families.

The “menu” starts with tripe in sauce, the signature dish of the canteen in the 1940s, through to the risotto with champagne, a symbol of the culinary euphoria of the 1980s.

Pirelli, the sponsor of The Tree of Life, awaits you from September 2 to 9 on the South Cardo of Expo Milano 2015, where it will tell you a story of Italian excellence – an example of the finest of the “Made in Italy” label and its manufacturing skills, traditions, and research and development under the banner of the “Long P”.

Historical images from the company archive and texts that tell the story of 143 years of Pirelli’s manufacturing excellence will form the backdrop for the exhibition of cars and motorcycles that epitomise other aspects of Italian excellence: mechanical wonders full of technology and passion, which with Pirelli shares a history of partnerships and great successes, in a relationship built up over the years with outstanding and innovative technological know-how. A world of passion and research, speed, and victories. Over the decades, and still today, the power and speed of these cars and motorcycles has relied on Pirelli tyres.

Ferrari models such as the FXXK and the 458 Challenge EVO are on display, alongside Maserati with the MC12, Lamborghini with the Huracán Super Trofeo, the Alfa 75 Turbo Evoluzione IMSA and the Lancia Stratos HF next to the Aprilia RSV4 RF, the Ducati 1299 Panigale S, and the MV Agusta F4 RC motorcycles.