The Autostrada del Sole was opened on 4 October 1964, connecting Milan to Naples. It was designed by Piero Puricelli, an engineer and architect who had built the Monza race track in 1922. The famous A1 is the longest Italian motorway still in use, covering 760 kilometres along the peninsula and passing through Bologna, Florence and Rome.

The history of Pirelli is intertwined with that of the Autostrada del Sole: it came at the end of economic boom years, in an Italy that was changing, expanding, and on the move. Consumer choices and lifestyles were changing and the motorway project was a symbol of this change: a broad strip of asphalt now connected the North and South, crossing the Po Valley and the Apennines. It was a symbol of one of the emblems of those days: travel. And Pirelli was very much a part of it, as one of the four companies (with FIAT, Agip and Italcementi) that formed the SISI (Società Iniziative Strade Italiane), a company consortium set up to promote their shared interest in road networks. In those years, Pirelli communicated and gave great visibility to this project in its advertising materials, audio-visuals, photographic reports, and articles published in Pirelli magazine.

We see a Jaguar E type and a truck with the Pirelli logo racing along the asphalt, as stars in the famous documentary The Tortoise and the Hare, which was inspired by La Fontaine’s famous fable and made in 1966 by Hugh Hudson, the future director of Chariots of Fire. The medium-length film uses an alternating montage to show the journey up the Autostrada del Sole from Naples to Milan, with a young foreign lady aboard the sports car and an Italian driving the truck. It is a tale of 1960s Italy in a mix of tradition and modernisation, and it went on to win numerous national and international awards, from the International Industrial Film Festival in 1966 to the Moscow Industrial Fair competition in 1968.

Motorists began to stop off on the Autostrada del Sole on their long journeys. They would take a break in the rest areas that began to appear on Italian roads and that dotted the landscape that flew past their windows. And during their break they could take advantage of a Pirelli garage to change their tyres or to check them before setting off again, because safety – now with the Pirelli Cinturato tyre – always comes first.

The autostrada project was also followed in Pirelli magazine, which published many articles by the engineer Guglielmo Zambrini, an expert in questions of mobility, transport and territory in motorway policies and planning at the time. The pictures that pass by are those of tall viaducts that took modern construction engineering to new heights, with an innovation in infrastructure that would forever change the way Italians travelled. These were the years of the new Italian highway code and new signage based on international standards.

The motorway is one of the many examples that show how Pirelli has always promoted modernity, playing an active part in transforming the country and helping Italians discover a new way of finding out about and enjoying their country.

Correspondence between two shrewd observers of the system of production, looking back at modernity and its challenges

Business targets and “captains” of industry. Leaders and leadership. Production organisation lent life by entrepreneurs and managers dedicated to a purpose. Even in the perilous navigation of today. Important topics, for today and for tomorrow. Topics that meet, on nearly a daily basis, with the complexity of the present and uncertainty with respect to the future. Paolo Iacci and Luca Solari – the first, Chairman of ECA Italia and AIDP Promotion; the second, full professor at the University of Milan and founder of OrgTech – reflect on these areas, looking at the evolution of the business system, but through a traditional medium for exchanging ideas: the letter. That’s how Purpose e leadership ibrida. Carteggio su organizzazioni, persone e società (Purpose and Hybrid Leadership: Correspondence on Organisations, People and Society) came to be: the book has a modest page count but hits saturation point in terms of ideas and provocative statements in the areas indicated by the subtitle: in the debate on organisations, people and social mechanisms.

The – literal – correspondence began on 25 April 2019 with a letter from Iacci about ‘Leadership and Deponency’ and ends on 21 May 2002 with one from Solari that reflects on ‘hybrid leadership’. Between them come months of thinking over the change that has occurred over the years that indicates the need for investment in technology, but also new processes, skills and more wide-ranging managerial techniques. The observation around which Iacci and Solari work is that we are faced with a new and more radical demand for well-being from people to whom businesses are still unable to provide a sufficiently comprehensive response, with the Great Resignation representing merely the tip of the iceberg. In other words, the culture of good business also has to revisit the subject of corporate purpose (i.e. why the company was founded) and sustainability as corporate raison d’être. These issues are also connected to a new model of leadership, in civil society as in organisations. Leaders capable of being plural, hybrid, inclusive and an expression of all people, able to adapt to structures and organisations of production that no longer have even the physical characteristics that they once did (at a distance not of centuries, but of a few years).

Iacci and Solari’s book is therefore a sort of journey into a changing modernity. A journey to retrace attentively, always winning and never trivial. There to be read.

Purpose e leadership ibrida. Carteggio su organizzazioni, persone e società (Purpose and Hybrid Leadership: Correspondence on Organisations, People and Society)

Paolo Iacci, Luca Solari

Franco Angeli, 2022

Research published that aims to establish the connection between labour market flexibility and its satisfaction in businesses

Working and finding satisfaction in work. It’s a goal that may still be achieved by (too) few, but a feasible goal. Having said that, you need to deal with ways of working as well as organisational and contractual structures, not to mention the important relationships between work and social and economic context.

These are the themes on which Giorgio Liotti and Marco Musella have reflected in their recently published Flessibilità e soddisfazione per il lavoro: una riflessione generale (Flexibility and Job Satisfaction: A General Reflection).

The main purpose of the research was to “begin to fill” the knowledge gap regarding the relationships between labour market flexibility and job satisfaction as a proxy of the confidence of workers in the company. The two authors concentrated on the 2001–2018 period in particular, of which they analysed various economic and social components in order to arrive at a “state of relations” between business and work.

Liotti and Musella’s investigation starts from a series of observations: firstly, the radical change in the rules of how the labour market operates; then, in-depth investigation into the characteristics of the “flexibilisation” of the job market itself. The question that the two researcher then set for themselves is how the introduction of flexibility policies, “which have gradually made work more unstable and precarious”, have “influenced the synergy between worker and entrepreneur”.

The research addresses a complex issue and offers two different responses. The conclusion explains that in the 2001–2008 period “greater labour market flexibility is connected with a sudden downturn in worker satisfaction”. This inverse relationship seems to vanish, in contrast, upon inspection of the 2009–2018 period.

Giorgio Liotti and Marco Musella therefore return to the initial hypothesis: focusing on the relationships between job satisfaction and labour market flexibility brings weighty subjects into play, which must probably be explored from time to time looking through different lenses.

Flessibilità e soddisfazione per il lavoro: una riflessione generale (Flexibility and Job Satisfaction: A General Reflection)
Giorgio Liotti, Marco Musella
Labour Economics Papers, 2021 Issue 113

“If you want democracy, first of all, to be enacted and then to endure and become more perfect, school, in the long term, can be said to be more important than Parliament, the judiciary and the Constitutional Court.” These are the words of Piero Calamandrei, one of most important members (“fathers”) of the Republic of Italy’s Constituent Assembly. They are still worth remembering today, after an election campaign that saw precious little discussion of school despite the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP). This genuine political and administrative obligation for the new legislature earmarks extremely substantial resources for educational issues, seeking to establish the best conditions for the Next Generation towards which the EU’s Recovery Fund is directed, in order to attempt to exit the post-Covid-19-pandemic crisis and the resulting recession.

School is a vital location for study and learning, building up knowledge, rooting in the awareness of students, from as early as the first lessons of primary school, the values and rules of responsible citizenship and the sense of active belonging to a community, locally and nationally, and including – looking to the horizon – a European community.

Indeed, school should itself to be experienced, in the microcosm of the space of formation, as a community driven by various parties, with special attention to the young people who study, and certainly not an environment dominated by the interests of highly unionised groups (the teaching or the administrative staff).

School is an educational sphere where you “learn to learn”, at the time of the rapidly and radically changing “knowledge economy”, when humanistic and scientific knowledge represents necessary values and tools to underpin civil coexistence and sustainable, environmental and social development.

But what kind of shape is school in within Italy? A recent study by Fondazione Agnelli (Il Sole24Ore, 22 September) documents how public resources are spent badly, above all at university, and how much work this entails in order to be up to the challenges posed by other EU members, and OECD members more generally.

Italy invests approximately €75,000 for each individual student, from 6 to 15 years of age, a level above the EU average when purchasing power is taken into account. We spend too little on university, on the other hand: 0.3% of GDP. Statistically speaking, the result is an aggregated spending figure (from primary education to university) for Italy of 4.3% of GDP, against a European average of 4.9%. Low investment, low graduate population, in short.

When we look at the figures published by Fondazione Agnelli more closely, we see that when demographic decline is taken into account, there will be 12.8% fewer students in 10 years (from 2020 to 2030), whereas school staffing has already risen by 20% in the last decade (hence the high spending level). Looking at another figure, 7.272 million young people returned to the classroom this year. There were 7.5 million in 2020–21: “230,000 students lost in two years”, as the IlSole24Ore headline had it (12 September).

The figures get worse over time. This year, 2022, there will be 385,000 births according to Istat, the Italian National Institute of Statistics, 14.5% fewer than in 2021. So we’re heading rapidly towards a real “demographic winter”, with an ageing Italy and a growing generational imbalance that affects GPD, care, social security and the quantity and quality of public spending (“The percentage of Italians of working age will fall to 50% in 2050,” Istat calculates). A mortgage on the economic and social sustainability of the future.

The situation is complicated, in short, with implications in the present and for the fate of schooling. There is some good news: the proportion of students to teachers is improving (from 10.9% in 2014–15 to 8.6% in 2021–22), with potentially positive effects on teaching quality, also in light of the shift in students per class from 20.4 in 2020–21 to 19.9 this year.

But there’s bad news too: fewer teachers have open-ended contracts, and more have fixed-term contracts. Pay also remains low, with performance-based distinctions largely blocked thanks to equalising pressure from unions.

Andrea Gavosto, Director of Fondazione Agnelli, made the following comment: “It may be the case that in Italy school spending has been poor rather than low, given the disappointing results in secondary schools, markedly lower than the European averages and with huge territorial and social divides. It’s an alarm bell for government, starting from the effectiveness and efficiency with which they will be able to manage the resources of the NRRP.”

There are further figures, to dwell on. In 2021, 41% of the EU population between 24 and 34 years old had at least one degree, 57%, with respect to the OECD average. In Italy, the figure was just 28% (without going into the even more alarming lack of STEM degrees, i.e. in scientific disciplines).

“Learning poverty” is also significant: 13 million people in the 25–64 age range – 39% of it – have only a middle school diploma.

The repercussions for both the labour market and development, but also for the general awareness of the extent of political and social problems – and consequently the exercise of the rights and duties of active, responsible citizenship – are evident, well-known and increasing rapidly.

School therefore requires attention. It must be re-imagined, reformed, rebuilt and relaunched as a function essential to development and civil coexistence, to enhancing the quality of democracy. Because development and democratic freedoms, the republican virtues of rights and duties, well-being and participation are intertwined.

Let us return to Calamandrei: “Turning subjects into citizens is a miracle that only school can perform.”

The exhibition Italy and Alliance Graphique Internationale: 25 Graphic Designers of the 20th Century opens today at the Magazzino delle Idee in Trieste. The event is curated by Carlo Vinti and organised by ERPAC, the Regional Authority for the Cultural Heritage of Friuli Venezia Giulia. The exhibition examines the work of twenty-five Italian graphic artists who have been members of AGI, the association that has brought together the top professionals in the graphics sector since 1951, and it is held in conjunction with the 70th Annual Congress of the Association, which runs from 19 to 23 September in Trieste.

Through the work of the twenty-five AGI designers, the exhibition retraces more than half a century of graphic design in Italy. The illustrious names naturally include some of the protagonists of Pirelli’s visual communication: from Riccardo Manzi to Bruno Munari, through to Bob Noorda and Pino Tovaglia, as well as Walter Ballmer, Erberto Carboni, Franco Grignani, and Albe Steiner.

The Pirelli Foundation is taking part in the exhibition with several original advertising materials, including sketches, posters, leaflets, brochures and shop-window signs from some of Pirelli’s finest advertising campaigns: Munari’s maze in the advertisement for Pirelli Coria soles, the man behind the wheel with a tyre over his eyes – the Ad occhi chiusi (“With eyes closed”) campaign – by Manzi, and Tovaglia and Catellani’s innovative Viaggiare sul sicuro (“I prefer to travel safely”) advertisement for the Pirelli Cinturato. And there is the amazing BS3 tyre logo designed in 1959 by Giulio Confalonieri and Ilio Negri. The Pirelli Foundation has also provided materials for the three thematic displays that show the work of the twenty-five designers against the backdrop of developments in graphics in Italy and around the world: an advertisement by Lora Lamm for a scooter tyre and one by Aldo Calabresi for the Inverno tyre.

The exhibition will run until 6 January 2023 and is accompanied by a catalogue published by Corraini Edizioni.

Rereading Article 9 of the Italian Constitution, in order to contemplate the strategies and quality of Italy’s economic and social development and reflect on how relevant that formal and solemn pledge – according to which “the Republic promotes the development of culture and scientific and technical research” and “safeguards the natural landscape and the historic and artistic heritage of the Nation” – still is today. A pledge that was recently updated – this past February – by adding that “the Republic safeguards the environment and ecosystems, protects biodiversity and animals, promotes sustainable development, also in the interest of future generations.”

Echoes of Article 9, in both traditional and modern form, loudly resounded throughout the presentation of the “Io sono cultura 2022 – L’Italia della qualità e della bellezza sfida la crisi” (“I am culture 2022 – Italian quality and beauty defy the crisis” report, curated by Symbola and Unioncamere. The event was held at the MAXXI, in Rome, to discuss the economic value of the cultural and creative production system (88.6 billion, with the potential to generate 252 billion and create 1.5 million jobs) and the important role that cultural processes and products have in terms of the competitiveness and growth of Italian companies on the international market, while also fostering the development of quality and efficiency in cultural and creative enterprises.

The underlying strategy is rather challenging: as argued by Ermete Realacci, president of Symbola, Italy should become “the main protagonist in the new Bauhaus movement strongly advocated by the EU Commission, in order to consolidate the ties between the world of culture and creativity and the worlds of production, science and technology, steering them towards the environmental transition defined in the EU Next Generation plan.”

Thus, rereading Article 9 of the Italian Constitution is important. Why? Let’s take a step back in history, to better understand.

Article 9 is one of 12 “Fundamental principles”. In 1946-1947, it was painstakingly and adeptly scrutinised, as part of the activities of the Assemblea Costituente (Constituent Assembly), by Concetto Marchesi, one of the most prominent Latin scholars of the 20^th century and a Communist; by Costantino Mortati, a greatly skilled constitutionalist (his books were used to train generations of lawyers up to the end of the 1960s) and a Christian Democrat; and by a young and very smart Aldo Moro. After a lengthy and laborious debate, the original wording was finally decided upon and, though nothing like it can be found in other 20^th-century constitutions, it nonetheless encapsulates the cultural, aesthetic and ethical themes that denoted that of the Weimar Republic (to learn more about this, it’s useful to reread the book published in 2018 by Carocci and curated by Tomaso Montanari as part of the series dedicated to constitutional “Fundamental principles”).

Its wording binds together humanist culture and science, beauty and technology, historic and artistic heritage and, indeed, the natural landscape, thus describing a veritable “polytechnic culture”. Furthermore, it paves the way for a number of desirable political decisions in term of sustainable development and implementation of the ESG (environmental, social and governance) principles, as per the 2015 Paris Agreement to combat climate change.

In fact, these are the Article’s characteristics that have made it increasingly relevant over time (despite our severe negligence of environment and natural landscape, for which we continue to suffer dramatic consequences). And now, thanks to its updated wording and a more internationally sensitive context, it has also regained its power as a legal and strategic tool suitable to this new era defined by the “knowledge economy”, environmental and social sustainability, and the twofold green and digital transition that will regenerate public institutions, private companies and “third-sector” structures.

Italian enterprises are caught between old rifts and uncertainties (an overall stagnant production offset only in part by quality manufacturing, increasing political and administrative shortcomings, the “demographic winter” and its negative impact on the GDP, a generally low level of education paired with an equally low number of graduates – not sufficient to meet the country’s needs and significantly lower than in other EU countries), as well as new ones (the energy crisis, inflation, a looming recession linked to the war in Ukraine and geopolitical tensions). All this gives rise to great concerns about the future. Yet, as in all previous crises (from the Great financial crisis of 2008 to the COVID-19 pandemic), Italian enterprises know that they can count on their own entrepreneurial spirit’s extraordinary adaptive skills, on a versatile approach to innovation that enhances their processes and products, on a resilient attitude that arises from their quick and effective aptitude for adapting to new market conditions – rather than merely relying on welfare benefits or protectionist policies.

In certain territories strong values, especially considering these times marked by transition and new challenges, are deeply entrenched – know-how is based on a “do and do well” attitude, a “polytechnic culture” permeates design and quality, enterprises are considered responsible communities where people are involved in the production process. Indeed, the ability to see environment and culture as resources, beauty as quality, history as a reference for the future, is something in which we should confide.

Italian and European industrial policies related to Industry 4.0 have eased this process of innovation and competitiveness and, for the sake of Italy’s role within the EU context, we now hope that the future Italian government will continue on this path.

Companies consider environmental and social sustainability not as a constraint but as a competitive asset, a leading one at that in Europe. Applied scientific research consolidates the productivity of regions, networks, production supply chains. Regional foundations are going to great lengths to open ITS, higher technical institutes, offering training programmes aligned with companies’ needs.

As mentioned in the “Io sono cultura” debate, this frame of reference is encouraging companies to invest in cultural activities, not so much in terms of patronage (which is nonetheless always welcome) but, above all, by considering culture as a productive tool, a feature distinguishing goods and services, thus asserting a veritable “made in Italy’s polytechnic culture” founded on beauty and quality, design, science, technology and functionality. A culture that encompasses the mechanical and mechatronics, automotive and chemical, aerospace and shipbuilding industries, as well as more traditional sectors (furnishings, agro-industry, clothing).

Know-how is key, but it’s not enough. We also need to reshape the way we narrate, produce and portray – we need to build a new story about a manufacturing, productive Italy. And, bearing in mind the strategic recommendations set out in Article 9 of the Constitution, we need to stimulate a new and deep appreciation of the quality that Italy can offer – with the awareness that “Italy must make the best of Italy”, as Symbola likes to say, and, in the 150^th anniversary of the unification of Italy, we need to actualise that extraordinary notion of a “sweet patriotism” that marked the Presidency of the Republic during the leadership of Carlo Azeglio Ciampi.

A research study carried out by the University of Parma refines current thoughts on good corporate culture

Companies and enterprises not only as economic elements, but as organisations with responsibilities towards the society and the economy in which they exist and operate. Themes that, nowadays, have been pretty much absorbed by most relevant literature and management approaches, but that, nonetheless, should not be taken for granted or considered depleted. Hence the benefit of the study by Federica Balluchi, Giuseppina Iacoviello and Arianna Lazzini, from the University of Parma, which delves around the “Creazione e condivisione di valore in una prospettiva economico-sociale” (“Value creation and sharing from an economic and social perspective”) – the perspective, indeed, of companies.

The three researchers’ line of reasoning starts from the consideration that companies can and should be perceived as “open social systems, that is, systems that can be represented in the form of models within which elements interconnected by interdependent relationships can be defined.” Balluchi, Iacoviello and Lazzini then continue to explain that “it’d be perhaps more appropriate to claim that companies can be perceived and represented as systems, that is, as combinations of subsystems to be examined by researchers, read and interpreted from different perspectives and with different research purposes.” Yet, the study emphasises, in order to properly understand corporate activities, it is important to ask oneself what the true goal of the company itself is, still bearing in mind that we are dealing with “open systems that interact with their environment” and that create or maintain “an exchange process” with the environment itself. Thus, companies conceived as “open systems” that “offer goods and services aimed at fulfilling human needs, and as hubs attracting work and capital.” Not just about profit, then, but much more. Finally, Balluchi, Iacoviello and Lazzini’s conclusion surmises that “what a company achieves does not only concern the company itself: in fact, companies perform a social function, as they are created to fulfil human needs and as their internal organisation consists of people connected with other people, and with entities, which are, after all, groups of people.”

The conclusion also adds that, “Nowadays, companies are challenged on a different plane than in the past, when profitability and a short-term approach constituted the predominant dimension of economic balance. What seems to have changed are certainly not the factors instrumental to an economic balance, but the importance that society as a whole, and as such companies themselves, attributes to them. Today, dimensions of (sustainable) development and social consensus play a leading role, representing factors instrumental to the triggering of virtuous processes aimed at fostering and increasing profitability. Such a change permeates the whole company, engulfing (…) all corporate areas, from communication, internal and external, to management, thus stimulating the emergence of economic and social governance systems.”

Federica Balluchi, Giuseppina Iacoviello and Arianna Lazzini’s research study does not add anything particularly new to the modern interpretation of corporate activities, but has the great virtue of organising, in a systematic and comprehensible manner, the whole range of concepts that, today, are part of good corporate culture.

Creazione e condivisione di valore una prospettiva economico-sociale  (“Value creation and sharing from an economic and social perspective”)

Federica Balluchi, Giuseppina Iacoviello, Arianna Lazzini

in Studi in onore di Luciano Marchi (Studies in honour of Luciano Marchi), Giappichelli, 2021

A book by a 15^th-century merchant talks about corporate themes and profiles that are still relevant today

A merchant should be “homo di ben conposta mente, integro et saldo, extimando in grande dignità la sua parola et in suma integrità la sua promessa (…)” (an individual of sound mind, upright and steadfast, who keeps their words in great esteem and their promises with integrity”. Guidance that was written in 1458 and that is manifestly still relevant today – very modern notions indeed. A “merchant”, that is, a business person, an “upright and steadfast” entrepreneur, 500 years ago as today. Such clear and transparent advice was imparted by Benedetto Cotrugli in his Libro dell’arte di mercatura (Book on the art of trading), newly rediscovered and reissued by the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.

Some consider Cotrugli the founder of business economic disciplines: a merchant and humanist of the Renaissance period, his work made an impression but he was then forgotten for centuries. Yet, this book represents, and with reason, one of the key contributions to the understanding of the origins of management and of modern business practices; a text that, by the by, also anticipates by over 500 years many of the principles underlying so-called corporate humanism and social responsibility.

Today, the narration of “the art of trading” is reissued in its original version (in the ancient Italian language) accompanied by a version in contemporary Italian. Prefaced by two essays that explain its content, importance and meaning, Cotrugli’s book begins by illustrating the origins and features of “trading” (that is, how this economic activity was carried out 500 years ago), then moves on to religion and how it relies to moral trading, and finally to the “civic life” that a merchant must lead in order to attain the “economic virtues” that make a merchant truly good and honest.

Cotrugli’s chapters are rather dense, packed with economic but also political concepts, moral rectitude, rules on how to live in society and care for others (what today we would call corporate social responsibility). As such, throughout the text, important terms that are also relevant to good modern enterprises recur, such as prudence, integrity, diligence, constancy, authority, temperance, and many more.

Reading Cotrugli is not always easy but it should definitively be attempted, with some commitment and attention, especially (and above all) nowadays, during this complex and difficult historical period that not only affects businesses – and in order to remember the author’s advice: keep a sound mind.

Il libro dell’arte di mercatura (Book on the art of trading)

Benedetto Cotrugli

Edited by AA.VV., Guerini NEXT, 2022

The Pirelli Foundation has recently acquired 25 photographs that offer a rare and fascinating look at the history of the Bicocca degli Arcimboldi, the villa that was built in the second half of the fifteenth century, giving the district its name, and that is now part of the Pirelli Headquarters. The largest group of photographs shows the restoration work carried out on the villa in 1910 under the architect Ambrogio Annoni. In those days, the Bicocca was in a state of neglect: “… the traces of fifteenth-century architecture were buried beneath partitions and the doors and the windows and balconies of the farmhouse it had become”, recalled Annoni in 1922 in a publication devoted to the building. After the Arcimboldi family, the former owners, died out, the villa passed from hand to hand, until the early twentieth century, when it reached the Società Anonima Quartiere Industriale Nord Milano. This joint-stock company was set up in 1907 by the Pirelli and Ernesto Breda companies, together with some financial institutions, with the aim of managing the transformation of the agricultural area north of Milan into an industrial zone, and its first act was to acquire the land. The restoration work was started by SAQINM, in collaboration with the Soprintendenza ai Monumenti, as Annoni always recalled: “… we owe them the merit of not neglecting the historic building, and indeed of comprehending its artistic value with a breadth of ideas that we would not even have hoped for initially […] Along the avenue between Milan and Monza they planned to resurrect the Bicocca, with the Mirabello at the beginning of the district and the Torretta at the end.” The villa was in ruins, as we see in one of the photographs, which shows a woman posing in front of the portico, with rubble all around. Some pictures show the workers on scaffolding or arranging a column in the portico. Others, dated November 1910, show some of the details after restoration: the inside of the loggia, a window, and the clock. Another four photos taken in 1911 show the exterior of the villa (and in particular the east side, where there was a small chapel, later demolished) and the interior of what is now the Hall of Duty. The group of photographs ends with two shots by Dino Zani from 1923-4, which show the frescoes in today’s Ladies’ Hall, of which only a few fragments can be made out. These prints are part of a shoot by Zani on the frescoes in the Ladies’ Hall, preserved at the Civico Archivio Fotografico di Milano. Like the other recently acquired photographs, they most likely come from Ambrogio Annoni’s personal archive. One of the two photographs does indeed bear the architect’s stamp, and the other a note on the back initialed “A.”, probably relating to the reproduction of the picture in a publication. The photographs further expand the rich photographic heritage of the Pirelli Foundation and constitute an important testimony to the life of the Bicocca degli Arcimboldi, which the public can now discover and explore remotely through the virtual tour accessible from our website.

The latest book by Luigino Bruni narrates the roots of our current Western-style economic structure

Before our current brand of capitalism and contemporary forms of production and enterprise, Europe experienced different varieties of capitalism. Knowing about these economic structures is still useful today, especially for those – entrepreneurs or managers – who deal every day with business, markets, profits and social responsibilities related to their economic activities, particularly when heeding that ancient varieties of capitalism were motivated and inspired by something larger and more complex than a mere financial interest in trading.

The latest book by Luigino Bruni (professor of Political Economy at the LUMSA University in Rome) encompasses all this, narrating the birth and development of that particular form of capitalism that played such a great part in the economic development of a few centuries ago.

Capitalismo meridiano. Alle radici dello spirito mercantile tra religione e profitto (Meridian capitalism. Getting to the roots of the trading spirit amidst religion and profit) tells us how, during the last stages of the Middle Ages, a kind of “great market economy protocol” arose, which subsequently, due to the Protestant Reformation, split into a form of Nordic capitalism, the inheritance of Luther and Calvin, and a meridian capitalism, the offspring of Tuscan mercatores and the teachings of Saint Francis. A very peculiar and complex process, which, in some ways, perpetuated the civic humanism of previous centuries while in others it distanced itself from it.

Bruni, using a language that requires much attention in order to catch every nuance, narrates the evolution and the characteristic traits of this way of doing business and trading. In particular, as mentioned above, the book (of around 200 pages) narrates the origins of meridian capitalism, highlighting its community-based, multiracial and relational features, with mostly male protagonists but also including some unexpected female presence, and with a particular focus on the entwined relationship between the attitude of merchants and mendicant friars. After a brilliant first chapter, which provides a general summary, Bruni tackles the key points of the story, through some peculiar analyses that he himself considers as probably the most interesting parts of the book (and with reason). Lingering on fundamental stages such as the Franciscan economy, controversies affecting some crucial economic concepts (then just as now), and the specific traits of “civil trade”, Bruni reaches the Counter-Reformation era, which, as we said, gave rise to different varieties of capitalism.

A brief yet intense book, to be read with great attention, this last literary effort by Luigino Bruni becomes a valuable tool of knowledge for those who, today, find themselves in the midst of current economic storms. In one passage, the author writes, “The European economy was conceived by a spirit larger than the trading spirit. And if it were to lose this larger spirit, it’d be in serious danger of extinguishing itself.”

Capitalismo meridiano. Alle radici dello spirito mercantile tra religione e profitto (Meridian capitalism. Getting to the roots of the trading spirit amidst religion and profit)

Luigino Bruni

Il Mulino, 2022