A research study by INAPP highlights the nature and functional ability of a particular kind of production

Social enterprises – a special kind of businesses, yet enterprises nonetheless. Almost forgotten, and now rediscovered, and to be studied and understood. These are the premises that inspired “Le imprese sociali: organizzazioni dell’economia sociale nello sviluppo dei territori e delle comunità” (“Social enterprises: social economy organisations as part of the development of territories and communities”), a research study by Sabina Polidori and Massimo Lori, recently published as an INAPP Working Paper.

Polidori and Lori (from the Italian National Institute for the analysis of public policy and ISTAT respectively) explain that the study’s contextual frame lies in noticing the renewed interest of public political and institutional debate, both at an Italian and a European level, in social economy enterprises. An interest that is also due to the implementation of the Italian Third-Sector Code, as well as of the European Social Economy Action Plan, and, further, by the objective effectiveness of these particular way of doing business.

The study aims to highlight the nature of social enterprises from several viewpoints, starting – as the two authors explain – by examining them within a social economy context as well as from a conceptual perspective. The paper then offers a quantitative analysis that illustrates the relevancy and the economic weights of this organisation category, based on the scrutiny of their main structural features (geographical location, dimensions, etc.). Finally, particular attention is paid to the shared administration of social enterprises, which also represents an innovative tool for the public policies related to this segment.

Thus, Polidori and Lori’s work outlines a particular kind of production organisation that is also significant in terms of production culture. As the conclusions state, “Indeed, social enterprises tend to maximise social impact within economic sustainability constraints, reversing the factors that ‘traditional’ corporate models utilise to achieve their goals.”

Le imprese sociali: organizzazioni dell’economia sociale nello sviluppo dei territori e delle comunità  (“Social enterprises: social economy organisations as part of the development of territories and communities”)

Sabina Polidori, Massimo Lori

INAPP Working Paper, no. 102

Italian primary school children are good students – they’re good readers and understand their lessons well, better than their German, French and Spanish peers. As their learning path progresses, however, things get worse and reach deplorable levels: one student out of two reaches the end of high school without having acquired basic skills in Italian, English and maths.

Basically: the more you grow, the less you know. Thus, we’ve ended up in the absurd situation where 47% of the Italian people have lost their literacy skills and are functioning illiterates, i.e. unable to effectively use basic reading, writing and maths skills in daily life – almost an Italian person out of two.

Here’s a snapshot of the education crisis, which also has an impact on civic awareness and democratic participation, on economic development and social responsibility – a major emergency that’s taking a great toll on Italy.

First of all, let’s take a look at the data. According to the 2021 IEA PIRLS survey, coordinated by Boston College and presented in the past few days at the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome, 97% of Italian nine-year-old children can flawlessly read a text and understand its meaning. The survey was undertaken in 57 countries around the world and involved 400,000 students, 380,000 parents and 20,000 teachers. The highest-ranking countries are, in order: Singapore (573 points), Hong Kong, Great Britain, Denmark and Norway, and then there’s Italy, with 537 points, a score higher than that of Germany (524), Spain (521), France (514) and so on. The EU average is of 527 points.

A good result for Italian children. Moreover, in Italy, as in other countries, girls are raising the average, with a difference of 7 points as compared to boys (something to be pondered about and constantly fostered, in higher education too, by encouraging them to take STEM (scientific) subjects – subjects where girls find themselves at a disadvantage due to traditional reprehensible biases, neglect or prejudice.

Furthermore, when taking a better look we can also glimpse a few more issues. A decrease of 11 points as compared to five years ago (also a consequence of the learning gap caused by Covid), while the impact of territorial disparities keeps on growing, with the South of Italy struggling (36 points less than the North – a severe increase considering it amounted to 12 points in 2006).

We need to insist on the dissemination of high-quality teaching, then. This can be achieved through the wise investment of PNRR (Italian recovery and resilience plan) funds aimed at supporting young people and their education (the EU Recovery Plan is called “Next Generation” for a reason), and, in this era dominated by the “knowledge economy”, by looking at education, scientific research and culture as the key cornerstones for a better quality of civic and social life throughout Italy, as well as for sustainable, environmental and social development.

Here’s a crucial issue: Italy’s competitiveness is closely related to our capacity for innovation, and innovation requires knowledge, especially in our times of Artificial Intelligence and even in the simplest forms it assumes. It requires compulsory education, of course – from primary school (learning about its good performance is excellent news) to university – but it also needs further education: life (life-long learning, as economists term it). “In a world where abilities age rapidly, the challenge for the educational sphere is to teach how to learn”, states Francesco Profumo, former dean of the Polytechnic University of Turin, former Italian minister of Education, Universities and Research and now president of philanthropic foundation Compagnia di San Paolo.

But what should we learn? Well, how to revive the best Italian traditions, insisting on the synergy between humanities and scientific knowledge, passion for beauty and taste for technological innovation. Greek and Latin, for an open and structured dialogue, and the engineering and critical skills of Leon Battista Alberti, Piero della Francesca, Leonardo, Galileo Galilei. Looking at tradition not as an “urn for ashes” but as a drive for change. Acquire a so-called “polytechnic” wisdom – rereading Primo Levi and his extraordinary books, such as La chiave a stella (The wrench) on mechanics and Il sistema periodico (The periodic table) on chemistry, should be enough to remember the value of this skill.

Related to this, intriguing news come from Naples, which is at the centre of a project involving the use of Lego bricks to teach maths. It’s the MATABI project (“maths” and “ability”), curated by the Agnelli Foundation, the Polytechnic University of Turin and the Lego Foundation, and involving 88 primary school classes throughout Italy, with 30 of them in Naples. The aim is to increase scientific and mathematical knowledge, with a special focus on girls, in order to immediately filter out gender bias (in Italy, out of 1,000 inhabitants aged 20 to 29, graduates in scientific disciplines count 13.3 girls and 19.4 boys, as compared to the EU and German averages of 14.9 and 27.9, and 13.2 and 34.7 respectively).

An education and gender gap that’s having a profound impact on Italy’s productivity, and that, therefore, must be drastically reduced in order to strengthen the country’s economic and social growth – a growth founded on the “Made in Italy” ethos, innovation, sophisticated technologies, the quality and sustainability of products and services (the mechatronics, automotive, chemical, pharmaceutical, aerospace, shipbuilding, industrial automation and robotics industries, and more traditional sectors such as agro-industry, clothing and furnishing), as well as on development assets such as specialised supply chains and medium and medium-large enterprises (our “pocket multinationals”). All assets that demand entrepreneurship and creativity or, in one word, education.

(Photo Getty Images)

Thursday, 11 May 2023: The winners of the second edition of the Premio Campiello Junior, the literary award created by the Pirelli Foundation and the Fondazione Il Campiello, were announced at the Teatro Franco Parenti and the Pirelli Foundation in Milan.

The popular jury, consisting of 240 young people from across all Italy as well as from abroad, voted for the winners in two categories, 7-10 and 11-14 year-olds, choosing from the six finalist books:

Nicola Cinquetti, L’incredibile notte di Billy Bologna, Lapis Edizioni, for the 7-10-year category;

Davide Rigiani, Il Tullio e l’eolao più stranissimo di tutto il Canton Ticino, minimum fax, for the 11-14-year category.

During the event, the journalist and science communicator Massimo Polidoro interviewed the six finalists, and the actress Emilia Tiburzi brought to life extracts from their books.
The speakers also included Mariacristina Gribaudi, chair of the Premio Campiello Management Committee, Antonio Calabrò, director of the Pirelli Foundation, Roberto Piumini, president of the Selection Jury, and Martino Negri, member of the Selection Jury

To watch the awards ceremony, click here.

Further information on Premio Campiello Junior events is available at www.fondazionepirelli.org and www.premiocampiello.org.

The latest literary work by Giuseppe Lupo retraces the history of factories through the 20th century and asserts the need for a different way of narrating the past

Modernity and tradition. Progress and poverty. Development and decline. Heaven and hell. We could find many other antithetical dyads – constantly changing and re-shaped by perspectives – to influence the readings of present and past (without, of course, neglecting the future, which entails yet another different viewpoint). Modernity calls for complex analysis, an analysis that, nonetheless, must be undertaken by those who really want to be fully cognizant of the period they are living in. This is why La modernità malintesa. Una controstoria dell’industria italiana (Misunderstood modernity. A counternarrative of Italian industry), the latest literary work by Giuseppe Lupo, makes for very useful reading.

Lupo reviews the 20th century, the century of modernity, a period that has engendered a dramatic change in economy and politics, leaving a deep mark on the cultural and social fabric of Italy (and not only), disrupting century-old balances, shattering the line of continuity between past and future, up to a momentous turning point: the end of rural civilisation and the rise of industrialisation. The past century rushed towards the future, a phenomenon that Lupo analyses through its narratives, by giving voice to some of the most representative figures: from Vittorini to Testori, from Fortini to Mastronardi, from Calvino to Pasolini (to mention just a few) and without neglecting the controversial relationship between humanism and science within such narratives and the house-organisms arisen in the second post-war period. A journey that reaches our present, characterised by a “fluid realism”, by new and different forms of working class, by the many frailties related to employment, and uncertain and confuse prospects. A literary effort that makes us wonder whether it would not be better to drastically change our perspective and adopt, instead, an original, alternative, organised counternarrative aimed at changing the world or, as the book explains, “at severing the umbilical cord with this terrible and majestic century of which we still feel we are the children”.

A densely beautiful book written by Giuseppe Lupo: to be read with great care, not always easy yet certainly useful and intriguing.

La modernità malintesa. Una controstoria dell’industria italiana (Misunderstood modernity. A counternarrative of Italian industry)

Giuseppe Lupo

Marsilio Editori, 2023

A recently published research study analyses the deep bond between cultural activities and “good life”

The paper provides an overview that attempts to outline different paths for “building well-being” over ten years of Italian history, starting with the economy and moving on to other different spheres, such as those of health, culture and psychology.

Well-being as the building block for a “good life”. and culture as a tool to attain a more wholesome feeling of well-being permeating our life. An important combination. for enterprises, too, and for the attainment of a corporate and production culture not purely focused on profit, and one that may find greater substantiation when scrutinised by scientific research. This is what Giorgio Tavano Blessi, Federica Viganò and Enzo Grossi attempted to achieve in “Il ruolo della cultura nella costruzione del benessere. Evidenze a livello nazionale 2008-2018” (“The role of culture in building well-being. National evidence 2008-2018”), a research study recently published in journal Sociologia urbana e rurale (Urban and rural sociology).

Tavano Blessi and his colleagues start from an observation: the topic of well-being is increasingly drawing the attention of academic studies because relevant in terms of individual and collective functioning. If we share this assumption, we can then surmise that what determines “well-being” can be analysed and find application in regional policies and communities.

Thus, the research study investigates the elements that constitute individual mental well-being in order to identify the most critical ones. A work undertaken on two levels: first of all, the work looks at the relevant literature, and then at statistical data gathered in two different years (2008 and 2018) in order to quantify the significance of factors generating well-being and finally assess how they may change.

As such, this paper allows to determine the underlying impact of culture – understood as the activities undertaken by individuals in their free time – and how it can represent one of the most relevant factors on individual well-being, explicitly illustrating the role it can play as a possible tool applicable to regional policies at the service of individuals and society – something that, by the by, is also significantly affected by socially responsible corporate operations.

Il ruolo della cultura nella costruzione del benessere. Evidenze a livello nazionale 2008-2018 (“The role of culture in building well-being. National evidence 2008-2018”)

Giorgio Tavano Blessi, Federica Viganò, Enzo Grossi

Sociologia urbana e rurale, 2023/130

Museums are like the backbone of a community – by keeping its memories, they allow to build its future. Similarly, corporate museums and archives record how vigorously entrepreneurial, creatively intelligent, hard-working and innovative an active, productive and socially inclusive community is. And it’s in this fertile interweaving of memory and innovation that the development potential of the Italian economy is rooted, together with its high-quality manufacturing and high-tech service network, features that are prized on the international markets.

These are the underlying notions informing the Museimpresa (the Italian Association of business archives and corporate museums) assembly, to be held in Milan, at the headquarters of the AEM Foundation, on 24 May. Notions that are further corroborated by the key terms chosen by ICOM (the International Council of Museums, founded in 1946 to support the conservation and enhancement of cultural heritage) to emblemise this year’s International Museum Day, held on 18 May: “sustainability and well-being”. In fact, as regards social and environmental sustainability, Italian enterprises have already conquered a privileged position on the global markets, as they turned these values into competitive assets a long time ago, while the Italian propensity for industry – Italy ranks as the second largest manufacturing country in Europe, after Germany – generates employment opportunities, and thus more widespread wealth and well-being.

To better understand all this, let’s have a look at ICOM’s latest definition of what a museum should be, a definition also adopted by Museimpresa: “A museum is a permanent non-profit institution at the service of society, undertaking research, collecting, preserving, interpreting and exhibiting material and immaterial heritage artefacts.” Open to the public, accessible and inclusive, “museums promote diversity and sustainability. They operate and communicate ethically and professionally, engaging the community and offering diversified experiences to foster education, enjoyment, reflection and the sharing of knowledge”.

Museums as living sites, then, as tools we can use to gain a deeper understanding of history and the human experience, as means to disseminate knowledge, as open, dialogic and democratic spaces. And corporate museums as places where material cultures acquire value and perspective by freeing historical narration from mere political and military bonds – as the Annales school taught us – to include cultures of work, food and trade, daily life practices, and a “do, do well and do good” attitude, as well as traditional crafts that distinguish the Italian regions and that – also thanks to Museimpresa – are being increasingly shared, enhancing territorial creativity and productivity.

In fact, there currently is a great impetus towards growth, towards writing “a future-oriented story”, which is turning museums and archives into veritable competitive assets, not only for enterprises but also for stakeholders, as by disseminating awareness about past values museums helps us carve a path towards sustainable development.

Creation and innovation, exuding the strength of real “industrial pride”, are the true key features of Italian corporate culture, and as such they represent the memory and narrative of a long, rugged and complex transformative journey of production technologies and products, consumption and traditions. This because enterprises, as communities of people, are key social actors within history, and their distinctive feature lies in a wide strategy combining so-called “polytechnic culture” (a unique blend of humanities and scientific knowledge) with productive processes, communication languages and product marketing, which are also mindful to the relationships existing between manufacturing, services, creativity and scientific research, between technological evolution and the narration built by painters, writers and poets, architects, film directors and photographers, commercial artists and designers. A civilisation steeped in images and words, people and machinery.

What underlies the activity of Museimpresa (founded over 20 years ago by entrepreneurial associations Assolombarda and Confindustria and now boasting more than 130 members and institutional supporters) is, in fact, an entrenched conviction that enterprises are both physical and mental spaces where past and future meet, determining economic and social development.

Indeed, our corporate archives guard and narrate traditional manufacturing wisdom and high-quality services, which are the cornerstones of an extensive economic, social and civic culture: documentation, photographs, films, advertisements, technical drawings, as well as contracts and employment records, which all tell us about the – especially human – dimension of labour, including its different industrial relationships, ties and conflicts, the evolution of bonds between entrepreneurs, managers, technicians and labourers. A social capital that, by defining its history and identity, makes each enterprise unique – the fluid portrayal of an extraordinary side of human life.

A book presents with 16 terms that may help us understand the past, and therefore the present

Understanding how to read the past and capture its complexities and multidimensional nature – something that is useful to everyone, and that, further, enhances that good production culture that should become integral part of every community’s general culture. Knowing how to read the past, then, through simple tools accessible by all. This is the goal readers achieve when reading (and rereading) Lessico della storia culturale (A lexicon of cultural history), a recently published book curated by Alberto Maria Banti, Vinzia Fiorino and Carlotta Sorba.

The work focuses on 16 key terms. It’s a lexicon that, through each term, retraces how new questions arise, how new sources and investigation paths emerge, how perspectives able to offer a long-range view on several issues concerning current societies open up, from mass society standardisation processes to the dynamics ruling relationships and social exclusion.

The terms given to readers are: food, mass culture, print and writing cultures, visual cultures, emotions, family, insanity, gender, war, heritage, mass media, memory, nation, race, sexuality, and technoscience. All terms woven into history and our present, creating the fabric that we need to stitch together in order to understand how we form a community.

Thus, Banti, Fiorino and Sorba – aided by a number of important collaborators – build a kind of travel guide, a manual for the understanding of the past, which also help us comprehend the present and build a future with eyes wide open. A book that, like every good travel guide, should always be kept at hand – in order to read it and reread it, as said above.

Lessico della storia culturale (A lexicon of cultural history)

Alberto Maria Banti, Vinzia Fiorino and Carlotta Sorba (curated by)

Laterza, 2023

A recently published research study investigates the positive synergies between digital applications in productive processes and the latter’s environmental compatibility

Transitions: towards an increasingly digital economy and towards an increasingly “circular” one. Recognised paths that, though already intersecting in real life, nonetheless require to be supported by theoretical analyses focused on the synergetic relation between digitalisation and environmental care. This is what Derya Findik, Abdullah Tirgil and Fatih Cemil Özbuğday attempt to achieve with their recently published study entitled Industry 4.0 as an enabler of circular economy practices: Evidence from European SMEs.

The investigation takes its cue from an observation: while the investments of Industry 4.0 enterprises and the adoption of circular economy practices are seen as indispensable to a sustainable economy, the synergies deriving from their interaction have been much less systematically and empirically verified.

The overriding question is: which synergetic impact can the interaction between the investments concerning these two transformation paths of production organisations generate? An important question, whose answer is not trivial, even though, as the authors emphasise, it is expected that these “twin” transitions will mutually strengthen each other.

Focusing on small and medium companies, the research study examines the effects of Industry 4.0 technologies on their circular economy applications within the European Union and, indeed, the outcome of these econometric analyses corroborates a statistically significant positive impact of Industry 4.0 technologies on circular economy practices. However, Findik et al. go a step further, observing how these results indicate a need to prioritise, in economic policies, plans for the dissemination of Industry 4.0 components, in order to enhance and boost SMEs’ circular economy practices. Moreover, and from a more general standpoint, this work’s findings illustrates how Industry 4.0 technologies are indeed beneficial to companies’ environmental strategies, as well as digital and industrial ones.

Industry 4.0 as an enabler of circular economy practices: Evidence from European SMEs

Derya Findik, Abdullah Tirgil, Fatih Cemil Özbuğday
Journal of Cleaner Production, Volume 410.

When discussing the future of Milan, in this era of radical transformation affecting geopolitical, economic, social and cultural contexts, it’s useful bearing in mind that the ancient Romans used two very different terms to describe a city: urbs and civitas. The former comprised buildings and infrastructures, streets and squares, government palaces and theatres, temples and markets, in their entirety, while the latter referred to the cives, the citizens, seen as a community animated by political and personal rights and responsibilities that shaped citizenship and its legal status.

Places, laws, community ties, projects.

Bricks that, cemented by judicial and cultural balance, represented the foundation on which to build the future.

Latin, as we all know, it’s a “precise, minimalist” language, unsuitable for “demagogues and charlatans”, as renowned author and master of pointed irony Giovanni Guareschi loved to say. And, nowadays, the distinction between urbs and civitas, between material spaces and immaterial laws, policies and culture, suggests that we do need to revive that spirit of community and coexistence, of civic belonging, of shared rules and notions, so as to avoid deterioration – felt by many as a threat that could swallow up a city whose population, after all, is currently still open-minded, innovative, European, entrepreneurial and supportive. To avert, in other words, a fate where streets and squares become increasingly choked with non-resident ‘city users’ and progressively deserted by its cives, its citizens.

Over the past months, the debate on the future of Milan has intensified on both authoritative newspapers and social media, centring on issues that, by all means, affect the quality of life and employment in metropolises all over the world – including, in Europe, London and Paris. Yet, with respect to Milan, these issues threaten to drown and engulf those features that, above all and over time, made it a very special city: a city that’s not a capital yet boasts a very prominent international profile, a city that’s not large (with a mid-sized population of 1.4 million inhabitants) yet is magnified by metropolitan relations and business and trade networks. A city whose social dynamics are anything but provincial, and as such peculiar within the Italian context. A city where global economic and financial activities interweave, turning it into a hub for multinationals’ projects and investments. Yet also a city showing a remarkable inclination for social integration (all newcomers are immediately assimilated into the Milanese lifestyle, a trait already noted by Alessandro Manzoni and Stendhal).

Milan is, indeed, a city rife with relationships and pluralism, where diversity is seen as richness, whose spirit suggests that you’re not born, but you “become” Milanese – an attitude that betray both its historical awareness and a tendency to innovation, a blend of native pride and fondness for an open, dialogic and heterogeneous identity, simultaneously urbs and civitas.

These strengths are still present, of course, but they’re now threatened by various recent phenomena that are causing fissures and wounds, such as those that are currently being debated.

And what are these phenomena? The already high and ever-increasing cost of life, starting with housing rental and purchase prices, which are pushing away the middle class, young couples, low-income “creative” and social sectors, consigning them to the suburbs, to the provinces even. A general feeling of uncertainty, both real and “perceived” (a “perception” that nonetheless reveals a growing sense of social discomfort). The idea that a transformation is underway, one that fosters the gaudiest aspects of flaunted wealth and showy social appearance while devaluing middle- and working-class entrepreneurial traditions. A pseudo-culture based on instant gratification and “presentism”, which is replacing the more tangible aptitude for high-quality cultural engagement in which theatre and music and art spaces are rooted. Basically, the notion that the “thousand lights” very much loved by non-resident ‘city users” and advocates of Milan as “the place to be” in its most superficial sense are casting shadows on a more substantial and far-sighted productive economy and on social solidarity.

The latest warning comes from Ferruccio Resta, former rector of the Polytechnic University of Milan, who reminds us of the wealth embodied by the 200,000 students attending Milan’s universities and, further, calls for adequate policies concerning young people (training and employment opportunities, easy mobility, a stimulating cultural and sports scene, cheaper entertainment) while cautioning the city about the “risk that young people will flee if we do not invest in them” (Corriere della Sera, 6 May). Thank goodness, the debate shows no sign of dying down, as witnessed by the seven tents recently pitched in protest by student groups in front of the Polytechnic – a symbolic, conspicuous protest against high rents that’s gathering followers and support.

Here’s the thing: Milan needs projects, as well as large-scale investments and good policies. Just as the enlightened governing philosophies of Verri and Beccaria – followed by the economic and social foresight of Carlo Cattaneo – taught us. And just as – more recently, from the post-war period onwards – we learned from mayors and politicians inspired by socialist and secular reformism as well as by social Catholicism, whose positive impact is still clearly felt and could galvanise the decisions of those currently in charge.

In fact, Milan is still able to combine high-quality public administration and the financial autonomy of private enterprises armed with a sophisticated corporate culture and capable of “overarching thoughts”, as well as good civic practices, and indeed it still provides spaces where public debate on the quality of social life and economic development can thrive. These are all qualities that, if pooled together, can prevent the degradation that ephemeral approaches and the “vanity fairs” erected by flimsy, shady, short-sighted new high rollers may engender. Qualities that may prevent a surge in discontented citizens, such as those finding a voice in satirical blogs such as Il milanese imbruttito.(The disgruntled Milanese) and, instead, inject new impetus into a more civic, productive, supportive and greatly dignified city.

Then again, the public economic debate has been focusing on the central role of “high-quality sustainable, environmental and social development” – as opposed to obsessive quantitative growth – for some time now, and an increasing number of companies, while still keeping an eye on profits, is now emphasising stakeholder values (those concerning employees, suppliers, consumers, the communities involved in their operations) rather than shareholder ones. Moreover, the development of a “civic” and “circular” economy is also being prioritised by entrepreneurial organisations (starting with Assolombarda).

Essentially, all the conditions required to ensure the continued influence and impact of positive energies generating quality development in Milan are still there – Milan is still a “city on the rise”, just as its history and artistic representations illustrate, and not yet a city bloated by speculation and growing, intolerable social inequalities.

There are some positive, inspiring examples, such as the renovation of the former Falck area in Sesto San Giovanni, one of the largest property redevelopment operations in Europe. Here, after an initial phase dedicated to the service industry and luxury homes, a new agreement has been struck to prioritise residential housing at prices suitable to middle-class buyers, and including a significant share of low-rent social housing (ideal for student and young graduates, for instance). Technically, Sesto San Giovanni is not part of Milan, but is an independent municipality, though it’s nonetheless comprised in the city’s metropolitan area. And the players involved in this operation – Hines, COIMA with CEO Manfredi Catella fostering good relations with cooperatives, the ReDO project (by the Cariplo and CDP foundations) and, in terms of financial stakeholders, Intesa San Paolo – are all leaders on Milan’s economic scene. Hence, such a model could be replicated and extended, and municipal and regional authorities could meet in the middle to implement beneficial policies and thus prevent social and civic deterioration.

Milan needs to be more like a civitas – the kind of more civilised and civic-minded city that, ultimately, Italy is in desperate need of.

(photo Getty Images)

“Dearest Dad…”. The story of Pirelli in Brazil began over a hundred years ago, when Giovanni Battista Pirelli sent his son Alberto to South America to report on the state of the plantations of rubber, or cautchouc. The young Alberto enthusiastically told his father about his journey of exploration in typewritten letters, which are now in our Historical Archive. In them, he gave detailed accounts of people and natural environments, along with photographs showing the state of production and the potential for development by the company. One beautiful letter that Alberto wrote on 13 November 1912 reveals all his passion for this task, as well as his rare spirit of observation.
Pirelli established its presence in Brazil in 1929 when it took over the Companhia Nacional de Artefactos de Cobre, a company that manufactured electrical conductors and that became Pirelli’s first production centre in the country. From then on, the story of the Long P in Brazil became one of technological developments and inspired communication. A story in which Pirelli corporate culture joined hands with cultura Brasileira.
For a better understanding, however, we really need to go back to the beginning. Between 1929 and just over a decade later, Pirelli “doubled”, for in 1941 it set up Pirelli S.A. Companhia Industrial, which added the production of tyres to that of cables. The company chairman was Giorgio Pirelli, the third son of Giovanni Battista. Within a few years, the factory in Campinas and the one in Gravataí, near Porto Alegre, and later the one in Sumaré, were all further additions to the one in Santo Andrè, just outside São Paulo. Among other things, the first tyre test track in South America was built here. Last of all came the plant in Feira de Santana, which started operating in 1986 with a special focus on the environmental compatibility of its production.
As we have seen, a distinctive feature of Pirelli’s operations in Brazil has always been the successful bond between Pirelli’s corporate culture and the culture of Brazil. And one of the best examples of these ties – as can be seen in our Archive – is Noticias Pirelli, the house magazine that first came out in 1956, a few years after Fatti e Notizie in Italy. The whole life of the company in Brazil unfolded in the pages of Noticias: from visits to the factory to answer the question “Onde trabalha papai?, to the holidays at Christmas and Easter. And then there are articles on the many cultural activities that transformed the factory into the perfect place for theatre performances, exhibitions, literary debates, and more. Over the years, a fair proportion of Brazilian culture has found its way into Pirelli factories. Also, Noticias reported on the countless sporting events put on by the Club Atlético Pirelli (CAP).
Brazil thus became a land of exploration and technology. And, of course, it has also made a huge contribution in the field of communication. Power is Nothing Without Control made history in Pirelli communication and, indeed, in communication in general. And in 1988 the sight of “O Fenômeno”, the Brazilian footballer Ronaldo Luís Nazário de Lima, in a breath-taking sequence of goals that ends by revealing his secret – a Pirelli tyre tread under his feet – was at the heart of the advertising campaign created that year by the Young & Rubicam agency. Previous editions had starred other athletes, starting from the many-time Olympic champion Carl Lewis.
Pirelli in Brazil: an expression of a close bond between two countries. It is no coincidence that, on the occasion of a state visit in 2016, Pirelli lit up the statue of Christ the Redeemer on Corcovado with the colours of the Italian flag.
A visible sign of the importance that Pirelli attributes to Brazil, where the company continues its investments in the twenty-first century, with a view to making the production of tyres increasingly competitive also overseas. Pirelli now has factories in Campinas and Feira de Santana, for the manufacture of car tyres, and in Gravataí, for motorcycle tyres. The story of rubber keeps moving forward, on both sides of the Atlantic.