Four cities, constituting together the “corporate culture capital” of 2022. Four regions, amongst the most productive and competitive in Italy and – why not? – in Europe, to create what is termed an area vasta (wide area), rich in manufacturing and services, able to narrate industrial stories and, while looking to the future, tell about the traits that particularly distinguish entrepreneurship: creativity, innovation, competitiveness, growth. The four cities to have won this year’s competition as the representatives of corporate culture, following an initiative launched a few years ago by territorial entrepreneurial institution Confindustria, are Padua, Treviso, Venice and Rovigo (previous capitals included Genoa and Alba). The opening ceremony took place on 5 April, in a very crowded Teatro Goldoni theatre in Venice, and we’re now looking forward to 80 events, held over the next months, featuring entrepreneurs, heads of institutions, political and social actors, cultural figures, discussing how to keep alive and enhance – even in such difficult times, rife with crises and geopolitical tensions – the distinctive Italian attitude of “do, do well and do good”.

Indeed, what do we mean when we talk of “corporate culture”? We mean an aspect of our more general culture that can combine, in new ways, humanities subjects and scientific knowledge, projects and products, industry and services, people’s passions and sophisticated technologies, while simultaneously looking back to ancient manufacturing skills and forward towards an economically sustainable future. We mean a “polytechnic culture”, in short, and the story of how “since the Middle Ages, Italian people have been accustomed to make, under the shade of a bell tower, beautiful objects cherished by the world” – to quote, once more, the strikingly brilliant description by Carlo Maria Cipolla, a great economic historian.

Culture, it was proclaimed from the stage of the Teatro Goldoni theatre in Venice, obviously comprises literature, music, painting and sculpture, cinema and photography – all the various representational art forms (which should generate fertile relationships with the world of entrepreneurship and work, too). Yet, culture is also science, mathematics, physics, an industrial patent and a chemical formula that revolutionises industry and consumption, as well as the quality of life (such as the one for the polymerisation of propylene, which saw Giulio Natta being awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1963). Culture is an employment contract that defines the power and work relations between the individuals that keep a company alive. Culture is both a balance sheet and a budget. Culture entails the innovative digital languages employed by marketing, advertisement and media communication. Culture encompasses graphic design, which, by blending beauty and functionality has been key to the industrial development and international competitiveness of Italian industry from the 1950s up to now – as eminently illustrated by the museums and archives of Museimpresa (the Italian association of business archives and corporate museums) over the past 20 years.

And culture, of course, also includes the industrial architecture that distinguishes the Olivetti factories in Ivrea and Pozzuoli and the Pirelli’s worksites, from the skyscraper designed by architect Gio Ponti to the redevelopment of the Bicocca neighbourhood by architect Vittorio Gregotti (from the industrial tyre and cable manufacturing plant to the “beautiful factory” planned by architect Renzo Piano for the Industrial Hub in Settimo Torinese – bright, transparent, safe and sustainable, erected among 400 cherry trees. A transformational culture that can be summarised as “industrial humanism” – nowadays updated to “digital humanism” – and in the various attempts to recapture the 20^th-century antinomies between Kultur and Zivilization, “high culture” and day-to-day technologies and know-how.

Factories or, even better, the modern digital factories, are the perfect examples of this. Indeed, in our current era, marked by the knowledge economy and artificial intelligence, working to find new intellectual concepts to express the confluence of this diverse array of expertise and skills has become crucial. To be able to face the complexities that are making our times controversial and restless, we need to take into consideration the multidisciplinary relationships between engineering and philosophy, mathematics and sociology, economics and neurosciences, law and mechatronics.

And to better understand the significance of “polytechnic relationships”, we simply need to refer back to Primo Levi’s The periodic table: “Mendeleev’s periodic table, which we industriously learned to unravel, was a poem, the highest and most solemn of all the poems we assimilated in high school.” Levi was an industrial chemist and, at the same time, an extraordinary poet, a major literary figure of the 20^th century.

These are precisely the dimensions of corporate culture that can become corporate drivers for growth in this new competitive context, made more difficult and contentious by the dramatic events we are experiencing, from the consequences of climate change to the COVID-19 pandemic and the recession, as well as the recent grievous evolutions of the war in Ukraine and the crisis affecting the traditional mechanisms of power and exchange.

Value chains are being rebuilt, within a new “selective re-globalisation”. New competitive relationships are being defined, while phenomena of backshoring – or reshoring – gradually intensify, with industrial production structures coming back to their countries of origin, and Europe turning into a revamped manufacturing platform. And the EU’s realisation about the need of establishing its own strategic autonomy (so as not to be crushed by superpowers’ conflicts) demands a number of political choices on security, energy and technology, which urge us not only towards a paradigm shift in political relations and economic and social development, but also towards new and better choices in relation to social and industrial policies.

It’s exactly this critical reinterpretation of the range of ideas that, in recent years, have guided globalisation, the digital economy and the creation of updated knowledge, production and consumption maps, that has made Italian corporate culture (memory and innovation, design and environmental and social sustainability, care for people and flexible, sophisticated artificial intelligence) extraordinarily valuable for the development of the circular and civil economy, and the relaunch of Italy in the European competitive contest.

Our companies – as stated in Venice when talking about the “new industrial triangle” formed by the Lombardy, Veneto and Emilia regions – do have some essential resources at their core, such as a dynamic social capital’s innovative power and a cultural depth moulded by industrial humanism, the distinctive trait of Italian economic history, which will continue to shape our future.

A new series of Parole Insieme, the programme of meetings with authors for Pirelli readers, this year comes in a new digital format: a series of conversations that are live streamed.

This time the director of the Pirelli Foundation, Antonio Calabrò, will be talking with the writer Remo Rapino, winner of the prestigious Premio Campiello, which was sponsored by Pirelli in 2020. This new event will look at the book Vita, morte e miracoli di Bonfiglio Liborio and how, by telling the stories of marginal figures like that of Liborio, literature is able to “give voice to those who have no voice”.

The book tells the story of Bonfiglio Liborio, who, now in his eighties, picks up a black Bic ballpoint and a notebook with nice straight lines and decides to tell the story of his life, starting with the father he never knew but whose eyes he is said to have inherited. His memories span almost a century and are intertwined with the history of Italy of those years. Remo Rapino writes this novel in a language that mixes Italian, dialectal expressions, slang and made-up words. Rapino’s Liborio is an outcast, living on the margins of society: a figure who moves through the cracks in history, in a world that seems not even to notice his presence.

To watch the video of the meeting, click here.

Enjoy the read and the videos!

A Detective Thriller in the Archive: On the Traces of the Pirelli Cinturato is the title of the event put on by the Pirelli Foundation, in collaboration with the Dramatrà cultural association, for the 19th Business Culture Week, which took place on Wednesday 18 November 2020. About 170 people of all ages, including some secondary school classes, were taken on a highly original virtual tour. The participants, who were linked up from Italy and abroad, were divided into teams and used clues concealed in the corridors of the Pirelli Foundation archives to solve a series of puzzles.

During the game, the actor Carlo Alberto Montori played the part of engineer Klaus Pneumad, a researcher at the head of a rival company of Pirelli in the year 2120, who had come back in time to sabotage the development of the famous Pirelli Cinturato tyre, and thus eliminate his most formidable competitor. The teams managed to prevent the scientist from carrying out his plan by solving the enigmas through logic, mathematics and evidence that required the use of much creative thinking.

During the Business Culture Week, the Pirelli Foundation also put on TIME4CHILD Digital meetings, which focused on the theme of sustainability. This provided an opportunity to talk with children and teenagers about issues concerning the history of Pirelli, smart mobility and events put on by the company concerning the world of natural rubber, in a tight schedule of live online meetings and focus displays shown on a virtual stand.

For all Pirelli employees, Christmas is a time for sharing and for a tradition that is upheld every year, with festive celebrations in the world of Pirelli, with greetings exchanged before the Christmas holidays, with a little gift to be placed under the tree.

In 2017 Pirelli once again opened its doors to celebrate its wintertime Family Day, a special Christmas treat when we accompanied our colleagues and their families on a visit to discover the historical places of our Headquarters, such as the Cooling Tower and the Bicocca degli Arcimboldi. The splendid fifteenth-century villa was decorated for the occasion, and hosted a reading by a professional actor who recited some Christmas-themed excerpts from Pirelli magazine.

Pirelli magazine was again the star for Christmas 2018 with Le parole dalla fabbrica. Il Natale nelle “grandi firme”, and again in 2019, with the release of our book Industrial Humanism, an anthology devoted to this extraordinary publication. On both occasions we welcomed our colleagues to a festively decorated Foundation with an exhibition showing the original issues of the magazine devoted to the theme of Christmas. So, how many covers did the Pirelli periodical Fatti e Notizie devote to Christmas? How many times did the December issue open with pictures of a smiling Father Christmas, with trees decked out for the festivities, with foam rubber toys for the little ones? As many as the various other house organs of the Pirelli Group have published around the world: the ceramic cribs in front of the Sagrada Familia on the cover of the Spanish Hechos y Noticias, the shooting stars on the Brazilian Noticias Pirelli, the children on the Argentine Pàginas Pirelli, Father Christmas driving through the sky in a car designed by Riccardo Manzi, bringing gifts, on the cover of the Greek Ta Nea tis Pirelli Hellas.

Even from afar, in this very particular year, all we can do now is wish you a very Merry Christmas!

Forty years on from his death, the Pirelli Foundation, MM SpA and its Centrale dell’Acqua, Fondazione Sinisgalli, and Fondazione ISEC remember the “poet-engineer” Leonardo Sinisgalli in a series of 3 meetings entitled “A Mathematical Fury: The Lesson Taught by Leonardo Sinisgalli”. Each event examines a different aspect of the life of this “twentieth-century Leonardo”.

Friday 29 January 2021, from 5 p.m., live on the online channels of the Centrale dell’Acqua di Milano: “Sinisgalli and Milan” with Antonio Calabrò (Pirelli Foundation, MuseImpresa) and Giuseppe Lupo (Università Cattolica, Milan).

Sinisgalli’s relationship with Milan began in 1932, when he arrived in Milan after graduating. He devoted himself to poetry and current affairs publications but above all he began the long association that brought him into the world of big industry and to the assorted group of intellectuals who had gathered around Edoardo Persico. In 1937 he was hired by the Pirelli Group’s Società del Linoleum. This was a brief but decisive step, for the following year he became the director of Olivetti’s technical advertising office in Milan. At Linoleum he met Giuseppe Luraghi, whom he encountered again at Pirelli after the war and together they created two of the most important Italian company magazines: Pirelli. Rivista di informazione e di tecnica (1948) and Civiltà delle Macchine (1953).

Friday 5 February 2021, from 5 p.m., live on the online channels of the Centrale dell’Acqua di Milano: “Sinisgalli and Civiltà delle Macchine”. With Gian Italo Bischi (University of Urbino) and Giorgio Bigatti (Bocconi University, Milan)

In 1950 Sinisgalli published Furor mathematicus, with writings on mathematics, geometry, architecture, arts and crafts, and on technology and the history of science. This was a prelude to Civiltà delle Macchine, the house organ of Finmeccanica which he created in 1953 and directed for five years (32 issues). The magazine was the expression of a multi-disciplinary culture that brought together science, literature and the arts within the framework of an industrial humanism that had a distant antecedent in Carlo Cattaneo’s Politecnico.

Friday 12 February 2021, from 5 p.m., live on the online channels of the Centrale dell’Acqua di Milano: “Sinisgalli the Poet”. With Clelia Martignoni (University of Pavia) and Luca Stefanelli (University of Pavia).

Sinisgalli’s “dual personality” as an engineer and poet began to emerge in his first publications in the 1930s and acquired its complete form in the 1950s. Sinisgalli maintained that poetry is a set of “real numbers” and “imaginary numbers”. There is always something that cannot be understood, something not immediately scientific, and there is always room for the imagination, but there is also much that is part of the real world. Writing poetry means reflecting on existence and on our ability to understand the scientific nature of reality by means of poetic passion. Which is always a controlled passion, and a highly objective filter.

You can follow the live feed here

The Pirelli Foundation is taking part in the Motion: Autos, Art, Architecture exhibition, which runs from 8 April to 18 September 2022 at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. The exhibition, curated by Lord Norman Foster, Manuel Cirauqui and Lekha Hileman Waitoller, celebrates the artistic world of the automobile, retracing its history through painting, sculpture, design, architecture, photography and cinema. The display winds its way through five main themes – Beginnings, Sculptures, Popularising, Sporting, Visionaries, Americana, and Future – which form the chronological arrangement of the exhibition. About 40 automobiles are on show, together with over 300 works, including paintings and sculptures by great artists, photographs, audio-visual documents and sketchbooks, as well as models by some of the most influential architects and designers of the twentieth century. The works from the Foundation’s archives also include original sketches for historic advertisements for Pirelli tyres, dating from the 1950s and 1960s, clearly illustrating the high levels of quality and innovation that the company achieved in the field of visual communication. The graphic creations of the great masters of Italian and international design, such as Pavel Michael Engelmann, Alan Fletcher, Ezio Bonini, and Armando Testa, to name but a few, interact with the cars in the Sporting gallery. Here we see the years of the post-war economic boom, with the new technical requirements of Formula 1 racing ushering in a remarkable technological and aesthetic leap forward. This led to the expansion of the sports car market, with designs that brought together art and fashion to satisfy the dream of speed and adventure. Cars were portrayed as cult objects by artists such as Andy Warhol and by set designers such as Ken Adam. The most emblematic examples became powerful images on the silver screen, emulating those of the great Hollywood stars. Pirelli was very much a part of these profound social and cultural transformations and the graphic works of our Historical Archive, which are shown here next to a photograph of the Pirelli Tower – the company’s first headquarters, designed by the architect Gio Ponti, – show the important cultural and technological role that the company played in those years.

Plinio Codognato, who was born in Verona on 13 April 1878, created some of the most famous advertising posters of the early twentieth century, for companies in the automotive and cycling sectors, including Atala, Fiat, OM and Pirelli, and many others. After studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Verona, directed by Mosè Bianchi, he immediately started working on advertising graphics and in 1906 he took part in the 1st Exhibition of Advertising Art at the Sempione International Exhibition in Milan. After initially working in Verona, where he made posters for the Fiera Cavalli and for the opera seasons at the Arena, he moved definitively to Milan in 1918. This marked the beginning of the most fruitful period in his career, and he started working with major industrial brands, and Fiat in particular.

By 1915, Codognato had already made his first poster for Pirelli, and it was highly successful. This is how L’impresa moderna described it in January 1916: “A lovely child on a bicycle, with a smiling face and his legs apart, appeared to come down a slope towards the viewer”. Italy has just entered the war and the child was dressed in the colours of the national flag. The advertisement enjoyed huge success in the following years and appeared in many magazines, including the Rivista mensile del Touring Club Italiano, which published it on the cover of its April 1917 issue, but also on metal plates, diaries and printed envelope seals.

It is like a snapshot of a child on a bicycle racing downhill, and in 1952 Pirelli’s “Servizio Propaganda” decided to recreate it. They therefore launched a competition among the children of employees, to find a child who would pose for a remake of the advertisement “to repeat, 35 years later, the same colour poster, but with a child of our own day”, reads the announcement in the house organ Fatti e Notizie. Throughout his career, Codognato remained true to his classical style, with mythological figures, centaurs, fauns, and eagles, which he associated with modern products such as cars and bicycles. This can be seen in his posters for Fiat bicycles with Pirelli tyres, preserved by the Salce Collection in Treviso, though he also adopted a more realistic and playful style, which in some cases became satirical and grotesque: one example is another poster for bicycles with Pirelli tyres – a recent acquisition for our Historical Archive – which shows the carnival mask of Meneghino, the symbol of Milan, holding a bicycle. Codugno continued working in the 1930s, creating posters for vehicles with Pirelli tyres, among others, as we see in the poster for the Fiat Balilla, also in Treviso. Codognato died in Milan in 1940. In his art and style, he left the world a timeless artistic legacy.

A collection of essays links neurosciences with corporate management

Feelings and emotions play an important part in companies, too. This might sound incongruous, yet it is a truly legitimate observation, so much so that in corporate management, these aspects need to increasingly be taken into consideration, leading to the creation and nurturing of a well-rounded corporate culture. These are the premises underlying this collection of essays, entitled Il cervello al lavoro. Neuroscienze in azienda: dalla teoria alla pratica (The brain at work. Neurosciences within companies: from theory to practice), curated by Riccardo Bubbio and just about to be published.

Bubbio has assembled this anthology of studies about “brains in companies” starting from an observation: emotions, feelings and mental processes – all that happens in our brain – play a key role in our work and in the companies in which we operate. We should then take advantage of scientific results also when redesigning work environments and restructuring work activities, and, in this regard, this book has a great merit: it offers practical examples, as well as theories, which also illustrate how viable it is to apply what we know about the human mind to different purposes, from designing a training course to organising an internal communication campaign.

This work, about 200 pages long, starts by contextualising the notion of “mind at work”, then goes on to explore the contributions that neurosciences could make to organisation and change management in companies, and finally analyses in more detail the theme of corporate well-being, seen as a “winning solution for company and employees”. Further, another part of this collection also focuses on learning – learning as a key process, just like playing, and how they both can be used as tools within companies, too, before tackling the role of emotions in marketing, bias in decisional processes and conclude with a chapter dedicated to ethics and enterprise.

“I feel I can rightly say,” writes the curator in the foreword, “that companies are just like conversations, they are made of human beings, they sound human, they are created by Emotions generated by the mind of the People that are part of them.”

Il cervello al lavoro. Neuroscienze in azienda: dalla teoria alla pratica (The brain at work. Neurosciences within companies: from theory to practice)

Riccardo Bubbio (curated by)

Franco Angeli, 2022

A pedagogic study takes a different stance on the notion of entrepreneurial education

Entrepreneurial education – not just for “effective and efficient” companies, but also to enhance one’s own personal development. The theme of entrepreneurial education (and, above all, of one’s own education) is a complex one, which Letizia Gamberi (PhD candidate, Department of Education, Languages, Cross-cultural Studies, Literatures and Psychology, University of Florence) ably tackles in her contribution entitled “Entrepreneurial education: nuove prospettive di ricerca per l’educazione in età adulta” (“Entrepreneurial education: new research perspectives for adult education”), included in a collection of studies on adult education post-pandemic, published in the Epale Journal, December 2021 issue.

Gamberi starts her argument by examining two categories, entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial education, from a pedagogic perspective. The idea developed throughout is that adult education still has a way to go to be included in these categories, which are also too often affected by financial reasons. Hence, an effort should be made to circumvent mere financial aspects (which, nonetheless, cannot be ignored) in order to open up wider opportunities. “This study”, writes Gamberi, “applies a broad perspective to these themes and is based on a value creation approach intended as the common element linking entrepreneurship and education.” In other words, entrepreneurship is seen as a development tool that is becoming “increasingly essential to encourage young adults to proactively plan their own professional and personal projects.”

Letizia Gamberi develops her line of thought by clearly defining both entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial education, then carefully outlines the scope of her research (i.e. identifying what the two categories have to offer, especially to young people, through the scrutiny of various teaching programmes), and finally analyses the results. “Entrepreneurial education,” asserts Gamberi, “must be understood as a driving force towards providing students with attitudes and skills that are useful in order not to lose one’s bearings among current uncertainties, further accentuated by the very recent pandemic.” On the condition, however, that they also count among them one of the key skills of entrepreneurship: namely, the ability to combine freedom of choice with continuous dialogue and debate with one’s surrounding environment.

Entrepreneurial education: nuove prospettive di ricerca per l’educazione in età adulta  (“Entrepreneurial education: new research perspectives for adult education”)

Letizia Gamberi

Epale Journal, no. 10, December 2021, pp. 22-30

The tragedy wrought by war in the heart of Europe, with its atrocities, the victims’ pain, the danger of the conflict escalating towards the threat of a nuclear attack, while, on the economic and social front, loom the shadows of tangled inflation and recession. We are living through dark times, with the COVID-19 pandemic still lingering and leaving behind a trail of death and long-term illness, and with the threat of impending climate change disasters. Dramatic times, combining Ulrich Beck’s “risk society” with an “age of uncertainty” whose dimensions are much more complex than those contemplated – with considerable foresight – by John Kenneth Galbraith in the 1970s, while the elusive, multifaceted and contradictory “liquid society” so vividly described by Zygmunt Bauman turned out to be encumbered by tensions and plagued by “retrotopia” – the longing for a magical past when things were reliable and the future was bright. Cracks appear in our vision of myths of “progress”, “reason”, long-term economic growth and the triumph of a globalisation to the benefit of all and, amongst the sorrowful flowing of events that, only yesterday, we’d never foreseen (those rare and unexpected radical crises called “black swans”), disappointment thrives, people take foolish comfort in “magical thought” and “conspiracy” theories, and the attraction towards authoritarian leaders and absolutist alternatives intensifies.

Should we then give in to downfall and decay? Should we then let ourselves be “sucked down into hell?” Far from it. If anything, by rereading the wise ending of Italo Calvino’s Le città invisibili (Invisible cities), we can actually understand the necessity to “seek and learn to recognise who and what, in the midst of hell, are not hell, and make them endure, give them space.”

The war, the ongoing pandemic and the environmental disasters are our “hell” and, precisely in such difficult and controversial times, the responsibility to instigate critical discussions about the political, economic and social balance that we need to reassert, as well as to draw new and improved maps about this changing world, clearly falls on scholars and social actors who have at heart the quality and stability of a better future. We need critical opinions based on science and expertise, the exact opposite of that vainglorious and disjointed chattering found on TV talk shows and social media, and we also need maps that plainly illustrate values and relationships – maps that are rid of nostalgic, melancholic thoughts but are brimming with projects and tools suitable to new systems of governance focused on developing relationships, interests, business, values.

In times like ours, we need to rely on legitimate scholars – magisters in Latin, with an emphasis on the root magis, “more”, to mean greater intellectual quality rather than mere additional quantity, which would otherwise be indicated by plus (a major etymological distinction, well pointed out by a wise jurist, Natalino Irti). Further, and precisely owing to the value embodied in critical thinking, we need to learn to discern more and better than before: culture from propaganda, intellect from mainstream thought (which can also affect cancel culture, as well as countercultural chit-chat), received knowledge from an earnest desire to scrutinise conflicts, contradictions, and the senseless hurry to elicit agreement in opinion polls without a care for the impact this might have on political and social assets.

Indeed, let’s return to Latin, the meticulous language of “reason”, and let’s recall the distinction we made in our previous blog from 1 February between eloquens, a person “who speaks well, ethically” (those who know what they’re talking about), as opposed to loquens, a person who simply “speaks” (often inappropriately, without caring about the weight and value of the words they utter). Similarly, in French – another rigorous language – we find an unambiguous distinction between écrivain, a writer (Pascal, for instance, who, according to Saint-Beuve, was an admirable ècrivain) and écrivant, a person whose job entails writing in a technical, bureaucratic language, with neither depth nor intellectual and creative qualities.

Indeed, these are times for scholars who know how to speak, write, reason, and who can wage a veritable war of ideas in order to defend, reiterate and revive the values of an open society, of a liberal democracy that is far from “decadent and obsolete”, of critical thinking and sustainable, environmental and social development, nurtured within an economic democracy and a market economy.

Further, these are times for dialogue, between the democratic West and the rest of the world, appreciating the diversity of cultures and values, with no attempt to “export democracy” yet nonetheless defending the “rule of law” (speaking of which, rereading the works by Giovanni Sartori, prominent scholar of liberal and parliamentary democracy who passed away five years ago, is really worth it, as aptly suggested by the Corriere della Sera, Sunday 3 April).

These are the times when we should assert the role and significance of an EU that, having successfully implemented an effective response to the pandemic and its economic consequences through the Next Generation Recovery Plan, is now debating autonomy and strategic security, with talks concerning shared defence policies, energy, scientific research and technological innovation. Lucrezia Reichlin is indeed right when she argues that “in order to respond to the Ukrainian crisis, we need a new system of economic governance” (Il Sole24Ore, 2 April) in order to “build a shared economic capacity” that can tackle the recession, the energy and digital transition, and any subsequent social tension that may arise.

No one really knows how and when we’ll recover from this crisis. What we do know, however, is that we need political and cultural responses able to address the geopolitical challenges that are affecting not only the business world, but, above all, our democratic and civic assets – a whole value system that we cannot relinquish.

So, here we are again, back to the open-minded views of proper scholars, rereading, with just a trace of hope, the words of Isaiah: “Guard, how much of the night is left? ”Morning is coming, but then night will come again. If you have something else to ask, then come back later and ask.” In harsh and uncertain times like ours, we need to move forward, understand, seek – without ever giving in to despair, without ever surrendering.