The Pirelli Foundation and the Premio Campiello are pleased to invite you to the Selection Ceremony of the Three Finalists for the Premio Campiello Junior, which will be held on Friday, 10 December 2021 at 11.30 a.m. and live streamed on the Facebook page of the Pirelli Foundation and on the social network channels of the Premio Campiello.

The selection will be made by a Jury of Writers chaired by Roberto Piumini, with Chiara Lagani, actress and playwright, Martino Negri, lecturer of Didactics of Literature and of Literature for Children at the University of Milano-Bicocca, Michela Possamai, lecturer at the IUSVE University of Venice, and former member of the Campiello Giovani jury, and David Tolin, bookseller and president of ALIR.

The speakers at the meeting, which will be moderated by Giancarlo Leone, will include Antonio Calabrò, director of the Pirelli Foundation, and Enrico Carraro, president of the Fondazione Il Campiello

In the weeks after the selection of the three finalists, a jury consisting of 160 young people from the final year of primary school and from the three-year lower secondary school courses will be asked to choose the winning title, which will be announced in May 2022 and celebrated in September during the 2022 Campiello Award Ceremony.

In the spring of 2022, the Pirelli Foundation will work with the Premio Campiello to organise a series of events devoted to the world of books and publishing for children. These will be for the jury of young people, as well as for schools and young readers across all Italy, and they will also involve the participation of the authors of the finalist books.

For further information on the Premio Campiello Junior events, please go to www.fondazionepirelli.org and www.premiocampiello.org.

Follow the live stream here

“I could sum it up like this: if I meet two people, one will ask me if I’m Pirelli the tyre maker, while the other will ask if I’m the Pirelli of the Lettere.”

A major player in one of the most important periods of the twentieth century, Giovanni Pirelli was destined to live the life of an industrial entrepreneur. And yet he also lived many other, very different lives. He was a soldier – a lieutenant in the Alpini corps – an aspiring aviator, Resistance fighter, writer, historian, and political and intellectual activist. The son of Alberto, he was a living example of one of his father’s precepts: “Always be a man of your time”. And indeed Giovanni Pirelli lived through all the crucial moments of the century of extremes in Italy: war and the Resistance, political militancy, diplomacy and interaction with the industrial world.

Giovanni Pirelli interpreted all the anxieties and outcomes of the century, brought about mainly by the Second World War. His experience of the conflict, in which he fought first as a private and then as an officer, led him to abandon his initial enthusiasm for defending the honour of the Nation in favour of a disillusioned search for a “new reality”. An attentive and sensitive observer of the places and people around him, he chose a strategic “frontier” position, opening up to many horizons. He was driven to soul-searching and intellectual thought that ultimately took shape when he joined the Resistance. From then on, his choices were clear: he joined the Italian Socialist Party and did not take his father’s place in the company, but followed his vocation by making the Resistance an essential part of his intellectual output.

One distinctive element could be seen in Giovanni Pirelli’s cultural versatility: his ability to bring together history and literature. Right from his debut book, L’altro elemento, published in Einaudi’s “I gettoni” series in 1952, he became one of the greatest commentators on the disaster that had been the war. What made him different from the few other people who wrote about it, such as Mario Rigoni Stern and Nuto Revelli, was the position he viewed it from: as a well-educated middle-class man and the son of one of the greatest entrepreneurs and diplomats of the time, he had a greater understanding of international interactions. Together with Piero Malvezzi, he edited one of the most important collections of memorial literature, Lettere di condannati a morte della Resistenza Italiana (“Letters of Italian Partisans Condemned to Death”) and in the late 1950s he published two articles in Pirelli magazine, under the pseudonym of Franco Fellini, in which he described his trip through Egypt with his friend Renato Guttuso. During the Reconstruction, his new political and cultural positions emerged in the discussions organised at the Einaudi bookshop. Here he met Paul Éluard, Ernest Hemingway, Elio Vittorini, John Steinbeck and many others, and he expressed himself through theatre, writing, cinema, music, documentaries and historical research.

A complex and fascinating figure, his human experience ended prematurely in a car accident on 3 April 1973. The variety of his interests and relationships paint a portrait of him as a rebel heir, who could never be made to conform to any precise model.

The artistic career of Marcello Dudovich, a painter and illustrator who was active in the late nineteenth century and in the first half of the twentieth, was in many ways quite unconventional. Sixty years after he passed away, on 31 March 1962, he is still considered as one of the greatest exponents of Italian advertising poster design. His works are the finest expression of the historical and social development of art applied to industry, which is the area in which the true essence of art can be expressed in just a few simple strokes to convey multiple meanings.

Craftsmen, factories, and rapidly expanding industries. The early twentieth century was a time for speed on two and four wheels, for adrenaline and cars, track competitions and the first intercontinental races. These were the years of great industrial complexes, with FIAT, Alfa Romeo, Bugatti, Legnano and, of course, Pirelli, as well as of the artists who were called in to tell the story of their products, writing a new chapter in the history of corporate visual communication. It is no coincidence that Dudovich crossed paths with many of these companies in Milan.

For Pirelli, he made posters for tyres but also for raincoats, and he abandoned the influence of Art Nouveau in favour of a more linear approach, accentuating the company logo. Textual elements, such as the slogan and the name of the product and brand, came increasingly to the fore, while the product itself had less visual impact. This can be seen in a recent acquisition made by our Historical Archive: a 1920s poster advertising Pirelli tyres for Cicli Dei bicycles, printed by Litografia G. B. Virtuani & C., which shows the perfection of the frames built by Umberto Dei together with the performance guaranteed by the tyres – which had already had already made a name for themselves in terms of innovation and road holding on both two and four wheels. The message is accompanied by the cyclist, recalling the victories of Umberto Dei himself, who was famous for having beaten cycling champions on his bike, even without properly training for the races. Here we have a poster that brings together many stories, on multiple levels, all in just a few simple, clearly defined strokes. This is something that the great graphic designers of the 1950s, like the great agencies of the 1990s and 2000s, managed to capture and maintain in what was a unique form of graphic art. It became known as the “Pirelli Style”.

A recently published book summarises a different approach to the reality we are all facing

Resilience and complexity, but also care for others, without losing sight of goals and targets (corporate ones included) to be met. This is the essence of the difficult balance required to sustain production organisations, social systems, families and also individual life. The kind of balance that Valeria Cantoni Mamiani discusses in her latest book, Leadership di cura. Dal controllo alle relazioni (Caring leadership. From control to relationships), recently published with a great foreword by Pierluigi Celli who, while earnestly stating not to always be in agreement with the author, finds this work “one of the most well-reasoned and inwardly engaging attempts to untangle, going beyond current trends, the jumble of perceptions and, often, stereotypes that characterises management literature and practice.”

The book begins with a statement: as well as marking an era of resilience, 2020 has also seen the rise of a new awareness, that of vulnerability considered as a universal condition, a standpoint from which we can restart and reconceive society, organisations, employment, power and its hierarchies. The author calls for a particular requirement: those in power must create a new range of values that will make organisations sustainable for everyone.
The book then demonstrates why and how nowadays we could practise a new kind of caring leadership, mindful, present, engaging and able to listen. A key feature is the ability to care for people while giving them sufficient space to be autonomous: the new leadership favours collaboration rather than competition and focuses on the interpretation of real needs, in such a way that their definition will include the recipients of the organisation’s beneficial aims.
Hence, according to Valeria Cantoni Mamiani, it will be possible to move beyond concepts that juxtapose authoritative paternalism and nurturing maternalism in order to give space to an attitude characterised by the ability to listen, thus shifting from a control culture to one where relationships flourish.
Thus, readers are offered a framing of the “context in which we live”, followed by an analysis of needs and feelings that delineates the guidelines of a culture focused on “care practices” and thus to the definition of a “new kind of authoritativeness”.

Celli is right: we are certainly not obliged to agree with everything that the book asserts, but we should definitively read it, to realise what a precious guide it is for reconceiving consolidated organisational behaviours and models that, due to the their vainglorious fatuity, have now become obsolete.

Leadership di cura. Dal controllo alle relazioni (Caring leadership. From control to relationships)

Valeria Cantoni Mamiani

Vita e Pensiero, 2021

A recently published research study connects the many dots of a significant area in contemporary economics

Social enterprises, lying between the public sector and profit-oriented companies, are hybrid entities that need to be understood rather than simply be considered benevolent businesses. Social enterprises make for a complex topic that needs to be approached with great care – also considering the headway these entities are gaining – in terms of the potential that such organisations offer and the particular production culture they embody.

Thus, “L’impresa sociale: dai concetti teorici all’applicazione a livello di policy” (“Social enterprises: from theoretical concepts to policy applications”) by Giulia Galera and Stefania Chiomento, published at the beginning of 2022, makes for very useful reading. It is a contribution that well summarises the current state of play of studies and practices undertaken in this area of economics.

“Over the past 20 years,“ write the two researchers in the first pages of this paper, “we have witnessed an extraordinary increase in interest concerning this diverse cluster of entities situated between the public sector and profit-oriented companies. Not only several economists, management scholars and sociologists, but also political scientists, historians, anthropologists and psychologists have devoted themselves to this phenomenon, or some of its aspects, contributing to explain their drivers, potentials, limits and evolving dynamics from different academic perspectives.”

This study is very helpful because, above all, its aim is plain: to compare the various concepts employed to frame the different aspects of said phenomenon. Indeed, the concept of a social enterprise is often juxtaposed, superimposed, confused with notions pertaining to social and/or fair economy and the third sector. Thus, some clarity is required, and it is precisely what Galera and Chiomento attempt to achieve. Besides all this, then, the article ponders on the meaning of social innovation, yet another big concept that often crops up when discussing this theme.

The contribution by these two EURICSE researchers appropriately begins by analysing the theoretical concept of a social enterprise, then continues to examine the main research studies related to it, as well as its applications. After a section focused on the legal aspects, which in Italy, in recent years, have had an impact on these enterprises’ sphere of action, the paper moves on to discuss social economy, fair economy, and the combination of the two, before exploring in depth policies related to the so-called third sector and, finally, social innovation. Galera and Chiomento, however, do not stop here and try to apply theory to concrete real-life situations (including an interesting and useful comparison table).

Giulia Galera and Stefania Chiomento’s contribution attempts to define and organise concepts and practices that revolve around social enterprises – a very good read for the better understanding of what is happening within a significant area of contemporary economics.

L’impresa sociale: dai concetti teorici all’applicazione a livello di policy (“Social enterprises: from theoretical concepts to policy applications”)

Giulia Galera, Stefania Chiomento

Impresa Sociale, no. 1/2022

Recent crises, from the COVID-19 pandemic to the war in Ukraine, from environmental disasters to the issues affecting global economies – recession, the rise in energy and raw material prices, the shortage of intermediate goods (microchips) and delays in maritime transport – have highlighted the significance and import of nation-states. In fact, national interests are back in the spotlight and seem to be overshadowing the globalist economy, i.e. the ideology of market supremacy. Values and interests that resounded over centuries of nationalism are now echoing back to us, magnified by the screeching tones of sovereignism – and the whole world starts panicking, hit by a shock wave generated by the inequalities ingrained in a multipolar society. New geopolitical tensions are deepening ancient conflicts, while ambitious grandstanding is putting considerable strain on the economic, financial and social relationships that have been shaping international affairs for the past 30 years. Essentially, we’re finding ourselves in the midst of a significant “age of uncertainty” and no clear, reassuring answers are in sight.

Here arises, in a different form, another substantial issue that has been dominating contemporary political debate: the issue concerning the relationships between state and market, emerging from the critical reassessment that’s being explored in political and economic literature of western democracies in particular.

In a nutshell, current debate is prompting us to consider the need to have “more state” and “more market” at the same time. In other words, a better, fairer and more efficient state that manages public spending more effectively, along with a fiscal regime working as both incentive and equaliser, accompanied by a well-regulated open market able to nurture entrepreneurship, competitiveness, meritocracy and employing resources as a support to industrial growth and economic development, as well as – back to “more state” – leading to more widespread well-being in society.

To gain a better and deeper understanding of Italy’s current situation, we can rely upon the wise words contained in “Bentornato Stato, ma…” (“Welcome back state, though…”), a book by Giuliano Amato, published by Il Mulino, describing a state “free from its old habits and distant, no matter what, from the hubris of authoritarian centralisation.” Amato is indeed a man of learning who knows about governance, with considerable experience as a key political player, the competence of a civil servant (as former president of the Italian antitrust authority) and the sound knowledge of a distinguished jurist (he’s just been elected president of the Constitutional Court of Italy). He explains that a return to state intervention, precisely in times of great and dramatic crises such as the ones we’re experiencing and that we mentioned above, must be able to withstand the pressure generated by political patronage, corporations and powerful lobby groups (high-tech multinationals included) and to make strategic decisions so that available resources are dedicated to general interest and common good objectives.

We’re not talking about Italy becoming a “charitable state” trapped by the pressure to perpetuate public spending driven by political patronage (thus exacerbating the increase of public debt, which snowballed in the 1980s and was kept in check by the constraints involved in joining the euro, only to flare up again after the recent introduction of ineffective measures such as the “citizenship income” – a welfare allowance dependant on income and citizenship – and the very costly “quota 100” pension scheme, aimed at encouraging hundreds of thousands of people to go into retirement), nor are we talking about a state taking on the direct management of financial enterprises (except under temporary emergency conditions). We’re talking about a state able to “juggle” temporary pressures and to prioritise political decisions, both during this short-term crisis and over the much longer period that recovery strategies require.

Amato’s book clearly identifies a risk: that of capitalising on the chance provided by the considerable resources made available by the PNRR (the Italian recovery and resilience plan), as per the indications of the EU’s Next Generation Recovery Plan, to reshape public spending in a way that will suit some twisted agenda aimed at reviving and strengthening support for unscrupulous, welfarist political forces. Moreover, knowing EU culture and its thinking patterns very well, Amato reminds us how the current marginalisation of ordoliberalism and of the obsessive ideology that all EU countries’ budgets should be equal does not mean we should just go on a public spending binge – on the contrary, what we need is a spending culture based on productive investments, rather than shaped by political favours (namely, corporations and politically affiliated businesses). Just as Mario Draghi, as former president of the ECB, insightfully observed when commenting on the difference between “good debt” and “bad debt” – a sensible and extraordinarily valuable tactical remark, especially in these times of crisis and war.

The EU recovery, including its vital need for autonomy and strategic safety, currently under threat by authoritarian governments, is founded on principles of foreign policy and joint defence, energy and scientific and technological research, and as such requires outstanding investment policies coordinated by the states and structured along supranational lines – the essence of the EU – in order to contribute to a “new global order”. It’s a “public” responsibility that ties liberal democracy to market economy.

Ultimately, Amato’s excellent book clearly illustrates the importance of “political far-sightedness” and “governing democracies”, and outlines a positive future for the reassertion of democracy and its values, authoritarian governments notwithstanding, as well as for practices allowing social powers and their representatives – the “intermediate bodies” on which liberal democracy is based – to play a broader and more significant role.

“The 2022 Numismatic Collection is innovative in terms of its subjects and production techniques, as well as in the methods of its communication and marketing. It is a prime example of how public companies can introduce great innovation, while pursuing objectives of public interest. Many subjects of the 2022 collection recall and celebrate major players and important projects for Italy and Europe.” This was the comment from Alessandro Rivera, the Director General of the Treasury, concerning the 2022 Numismatic Collection, which was unveiled today by the Ministry of Economy and Finance and by the Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato (State Printing Office and Mint) at the Museo della Zecca in Rome. In the catalogue, the “Eccellenze Italiane” series includes a trio of commemorative coins in gold and silver, dedicated to the 150th anniversary of the founding of Pirelli. The subjects reproduced on the three coins, using both manual and digital techniques and with colour inserts, highlight the innovations of the company’s products and its visual communication over the years: a tyre racing across a stylised car, the iconic advertising campaigns of the early twentieth century and 1960s, a picture of the first factory, set up in 1872 by Giovanni Battista Pirelli in Via Ponte Seveso, in Milan. A postage stamp dedicated to the company will also be issued on Friday, 28 January, as part of a series celebrating centres of excellence in the production and economic system. Creativity, brilliant minds and industry are thus celebrated in collectible items that express the historical, artistic, cultural and intangible identity of the Pirelli Group.

Now in its tenth edition, Cinema & History, the free online training and refresher course for secondary school teachers is about to start up again. Promoted by Fondazione ISEC and the Pirelli Foundation, it is being put on in collaboration with the Cinema Beltrade in Milan.

The course, entitled L’Italia tra declini e rinascite. Una storia economica (“Italy and its booms and busts – an economic history”) provides the tools needed to paint the full economic picture in educational courses. In a diachronic progression, from the Unification of Italy to the present day, the crucial turning points and themes in the Italian economy will be examined in connection with the way they have been shown in cinema.

Again this year, the five historical lessons will be accompanied by a number of films selected by Cinema Beltrade and, to help teachers use films for educational purposes, there will be a Cinema in the classroom workshop.

The meetings will all be held on Mondays, from 4 to 6 p.m., from 7 March to 11 April 2022.

Registration for the course is free but required. Please write to didattica@fondazioneisec.it by Monday, 28 February 2022. The meetings will be held live on the Microsoft Teams platform. For further information, please write to scuole@fondazionepirelli.org.

Places on the course are limited and registrations will be accepted on a first-come first-served basis.

For the general programme of the course, click here.

The Premio Campiello Junior keeps pressing ahead, towards the moment when the winner of the first edition will be announced on Friday, 6 May 2022.

For the young people on the Readers’ Jury, the time has come to read and choose their favourite book. On Wednesday, 9 March 2022, over a hundred very young jurors, from schools across all Italy as well as from abroad, came together for a meeting put on for them by the Pirelli Foundation and the Fondazione Il Campiello.

The young people had a chance to talk about their passion for reading and their first impressions of the three finalist books in a conversation with the team of Pirelli Foundation Educational, together with Chiara Lagani and Michela Possamai, two members of the Selection Jury that in December chose the three finalist titles from the many candidates.

The young readers of the Jury clearly showed their deep love for books and a great desire to make their opinions known. The choice they make over the coming weeks will help decide which book wins the prestigious award.

The next event, which will be for all those who love reading, will be live-streamed on Tuesday, 5 April 2022 with the participation of the finalists: Chiara Carminati, Guido Quarzo and Anna Vivarelli, and Antonella Sbuelz, who will tell the audience about what inspired the stories and characters that they brought to life in their books.

For further information on the Premio Campiello Junior events, please go to www.fondazionepirelli.org and www.premiocampiello.org

A meeting will be held on Tuesday, 5 April 2022 at 5.30 p.m. to inform all passionate young readers about the three books selected for the finals of the first edition of the Premio Campiello Junior:

Chiara Carminati, Un pinguino a Trieste, Bompiani

Guido Quarzo – Anna Vivarelli, La scatola dei sogni, Editoriale Scienza

Antonella Sbuelz, Questa notte non torno, Feltrinelli

During the live-streamed event, which is organised by the Pirelli Foundation and the Fondazione Il Campiello, the authors will talk with the jury members Chiara Lagani, Martino Negri and David Tolin about what inspired the stories and characters that they brought to life in their books. The event will be introduced by Roberto Piumini, President of the jury.

Over the next few weeks, the young people on the Readers’ Jury will be asked to express their preference, choosing the book that will win the coveted award. The winner will be announced on Friday, 6 May 2022.

To follow the live stream, click here.

For further information on the Premio Campiello Junior events, please go to www.fondazionepirelli.org and www.premiocampiello.org.