New free educational activities for schools set to start in September.

Sustainable mobility, research into renewable raw materials, technological innovation and development, creativity and new communication tools, and the factories of the future will be the main issues to be examined in the courses.

Innovation has always been a distinctive feature of Pirelli and the digital courses put on by Pirelli Foundation Educational in 2021/2022 will help students discover the innovations that the company has introduced in the fields of technology and industry, of architecture and visual communication, and of environmental and social sustainability. The materials in the Historical Archive that tell these stories of development and innovation can be used to inspire the creation of new projects for the future

With the guidance of the staff at the Pirelli Foundation, the students will be able to virtually enter and wander through the Archive, learning how to carry out in-depth studies and how to develop content that will help them create different documents for each type of workshop.

In particular, children from primary schools will be able to travel through time and space to discover the great inventions that have changed the way we live, helping them learn about how the first rubber factory in Italy came to be built, and then putting on an exhibition in the classroom. Or they will be able to find out about the city of Milan through the most “Pirellian” places, which they can include in their own personal maps.

The students from lower secondary schools will go straight to the heart of tyre production and discover its complexities, and then they will be plunged into the most exciting races on Pirelli tyres. They will learn about the urban transformation of Milan during the twentieth century and create interactive maps, or create a comic-strip story, to illustrate all the secrets of rubber.

Finally, students from upper secondary schools will be invited to create podcasts and design posters, taking inspiration from the great masters of graphic design, such as Bob Noorda, Lora Lamm and Bruno Munari, or to design a company headquarters for the future, respecting the fundamental criteria of sustainability, based on the designs by architects such as Gio Ponti, Vittorio Gregotti and Renzo Piano. By studying the technological innovations that Pirelli has introduced in the manufacture of safe, sustainable tyres over the past hundred and fifty years, the students will develop a creative but also scientific approach to the world around them.

The online course, which was perfected during the last school year, will be further expanded with new virtual tours, podcasts, videos and creative activities, which will help the children and young people find out more about Pirelli’s 150-year corporate culture and will act as a starting point for imagining and planning the future. The content provided will also make it possible for the participants to continue studying on their own after the course ends.

A webinar will be held on Monday 20 September 2021 at 5.30 p.m. to present the new courses that will be available to classes across all Italy.

The webinar is open to teachers and all those who may be interested.

To take part, please write to scuole@fondazionepirelli.org indicating your name and surname and, if you are a teacher, your main areas of interest and details of your school. You will then receive a link to take part on the Microsoft Teams platform.

To keep up to date on all our activities, sign up to the Pirelli Foundation mailing list from the homepage of the site

Ever since it was first set up, one of the most important missions of our Foundation has been to protect and preserve the company’s heritage, also by working with other cultural and academic institutions. This has led to our collaboration with the Accademia di Brera, an institution with which the Foundation has already worked in the past, to protect our collection of historical photographs, which includes hundreds of thousands of shots (negatives on plate and film, prints, and slides), made to advertise products, to illustrate company magazines and to record and communicate the company’s activities from the 1910s to the 1990s. A week of intense work has just come to an end for the students on the academy’s course in photograph restoration. During a five-day on-site course, the students, led by their teacher Alice Laudisa, were able to practice cleaning and restoring about a thousand negatives from the Archive.

The activity focused on the collection of transparencies: about 18,000 negatives and colour transparencies on film and glass plate mostly made between the 1950s and 1970s and preserved in parchment envelopes kept in small cardboard boxes. The collection presented some critical issues regarding the conservation and quality of the images. On the one hand, the original materials are not suitable for permanent conservation, while on the other, the images fixed on fragile and delicate supports such as plates can be difficult to make out. The students thus worked on cleaning and reconditioning the materials, and on recomposing the damaged plates by placing them in passe-partouts. A descriptive sheet was compiled for each transparency and a photograph was taken of each one on a light box, to make sure it could be viewed properly and to facilitate the cataloguing and digitisation processes that will come after this initial risk-prevention phase. The students were able to put into practice the restoration techniques they had learnt during the course and practice on different types of original materials, thanks to the variety and richness of the items preserved by our Foundation in its archive.

Guided tours of the exhibition Skyscraper Stories: The Pirellone and a Sixty-year Celebration of Corporate Culture and the Regional Government of Lombardy, put on for the 2021 edition of Archivi Aperti di Rete Fotografia. Photography was the underlying theme of the event, which also involved children and teenagers. Aldo Ballo, Arno Hammacher, Paolo Monti, and Dino Sala are some of the great photographers who have captured the Pirelli Tower in their shots, giving even greater emphasis to the drive towards the future that the building designed by Gio Ponti has always inspired. Its essential finished form also became the backdrop for great films as well as for numerous photographic reportages, like the one by Ugo Mulas for the La Moda e il grattacielo catalogue. The photographs on display include the iconic image of an immigrant in front of the building, taken by Uliano Lucas. In one of the video installations in the exhibition, the photographer himself explains how it came about.

One of the activities was for children and young people, who were able to discover the Pirelli Tower with a “logbook” that was added to on each step of the way with illustrations, quotations and collages that showed them the past, present and future of this extraordinary building. A building that has witnessed more than sixty years of Milanese history.

The Pirelli Foundation will be present again this year at the “Settimana della Cultura d’Impresa”, or Business Culture Week, a series of events on business culture promoted by Museimpresa, which is putting on a rich calendar that will end in December 2021, celebrating its twentieth year. The Pirelli Foundation is putting on two events: the first, “Milan on the Horizon: The City Viewed from the Tower”, on Monday 8 November, starred the Pirellone, the life of which has spanned 60 years, witnessing the transformations while also following the history of the “vertical city”.

The guided tours of the Skyscraper Stories exhibition were given greater forcefulness by an actor, who played the parts of some those whose names are linked to this famous symbol of modernity: Gio Ponti with his idea of the city of the future, Dino Buzzati and Pirelli magazine, Bob Noorda with the symbol of the Camunian Rose, and many others.

Visitors were also able to become “photojournalists” themselves and immortalise the view of Milan from the 26th floor of the Tower, a building that comes from the past and that, from on high, looks to the future.

Guided tours of our Foundation on Thursday 11 and Friday 12 November will take participants “On the Way with Pirelli”. Documents preserved in our Historical Archive will make it possible to find out about the rubber products and innovative materials that have always been with us on our travels. We will discover the advertising campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s, which invited millions of motorists to travel safely on Pirelli tyres, as well as the travel articles, the stories written by great twentieth-century writers and the reportages of photographers who showed us faraway lands in their artistic visions in Pirelli magazine.

We are all set and ready to go: another journey through history and into the corporate culture of Pirelli begins here.

To take part in the events:

Monday, 8 November 2021, Pirelli Tower, Via Fabio Filzi 22, Milan

Visits start at: 2.30 p.m., 4 p.m. and 5.30 p.m. (three tours of about 60 minutes each)

Booking required, please click here

Thursday 11 and Friday 12 November 2021, Pirelli Foundation, entrance from Viale Sarca 220, Milan

Visit start at: 4 p.m. (lasts about 60 minutes)

Booking required. Please click here to book by Monday 8 November

BookCity Milano 2021 is back, from 17 to 21 November 2021. Promoted by the City of Milan and the BookCity Milano Association, it is now in its tenth edition, once again placing books and readers at the heart of a series of events in the city. Pirelli has always supported events that promote reading, and is once again reconfirming its commitment to BookCity.

The theme chosen for 2021 is “After the Pandemic”. Over a year since the pandemic began, it is time to turn our attention to the future, posing questions to both writers and readers and trying to find answers by placing books, words and dialogue at the centre of our considerations.

More than 1,400 events have been planned and they will be held at more than 260 locations throughout the Milan area, as well as online. #BCM events will also be held at universities and there will be initiatives for schools.

In previous years, the Pirelli Foundation has put on various BookCity events, such as the “Tales of Milan as an Industrial City” event in 2018, in which literature and conversations, and the words and images of factories and neighbourhoods in Milan were linked together in memories and current events. In 2019 there were two events: “Corporate Memory, Quality of Economic Results, Empowering the City” at Bocconi University, and “Industrial Humanism in Milan: Business, Science, Literature. A Historical, Cultural, and Social Look at Southern Intellectuals in the North”, at the Fondazione Corriere.

You will find the full programme of events on the official website: bookcitymilano.it

Promoting reading and business culture among the young. To achieve this, the Pirelli Foundation again confirms its commitment to #ioleggoperché, the initiative promoted by the Italian Publishers Association (AIE) that aims to encourage reading among the very young and to set up and expand school libraries.

This year’s edition of #ioleggoperché, the theme of which is “Let’s go back to books”, will involve 3.4 million students, 20,388 schools and 2,743 bookshops. It is also sponsored by the Ministry of Culture and will be assisted by the Ministry of Education. The Pirelli Foundation will also support the project on social media channels with a series of reading tips and quizzes for children and young people devoted to the world of books.

The support for #ioleggoperché comes in addition to the assistance that Pirelli and the Pirelli Foundation provide to numerous initiatives to promote reading. These include the Premio Campiello and, this year, the new Premio Campiello Junior, a literary award for works of fiction and poetry for young readers aged between 10 and 14, and the BookCity Milano event promoted by the Municipality of Milan, which places books and readers at the heart of a series of events in the city.

A giant advertising image was plastered across all Milan: a man, seen from below, walking on a sheet of glass. With the soles and heels of his shoes seen up close: made by Pirelli. The picture was the work of Ermanno Scopinich, for an advertising campaign that made the history of visual communication. A history of research, at the cutting edge of innovation, that began in the 1930s when Pirelli started opening up new horizons also in the world of footwear, developing new technologies for life outdoors. The product was the “Alpine sole”, which later replaced studded boots. The concept came from a climb to the summit of Punta Rasica in Val Bregaglia in 1935. Nineteen climbers attempted the ascent. One of them was Vitale Bramani, a scholar with CAI at the time, winner of a gold medal for valour for his contribution to opening up passages through the Alps and the personal guide of King Albert I of Belgium during his climbs in the Dolomites. The group was caught off-guard by a sudden blizzard while climbing, and they lacked adequate protection against the cold: with just hemp-cord shoes on their feet, frostbite got the better of six of them. Two different types of boots were used in the early days of mountaineering: one type (spiked boots) took them safely to the rock wall and a lighter (hemp-cord) shoe was used for the climb itself, but these proved to be totally inadequate on several extreme occasions, putting the lives of the explorers at risk. Bramani immediately realised how unsuitable such equipment was and, determined to avoid other similar tragedies in future, he set out to find a way to improve the safety of mountaineers by creating a single boot that could be used in both situations and that, above all, would not slip. Ever. Whether at the top of Everest, or in mud or on wet ice.

The breakthrough came as the result of a chance encounter: Bramani met Franco Brambilla, the future managing director of Pirelli and Leopoldo Pirelli’s brother-in-law. That’s when the light-bulb moment came: why not give the soles the grip typically found on tyres? Together they studied a new vulcanised rubber compound and a technical design based on Pirelli’s tread patterns. With clearly marked symmetrical, cross-shaped blocks, the prototypes perfectly forced out snow and debris, offering greater grip and compactness at every stage of the excursion, from the approach to the wall to the climb itself.

The year was 1937 and a new type of technical sole emerged from the Pirelli laboratory. The Vibram sole was patented and became known as the carroarmato or “tank” tread. It was an overnight success but it really hit the headlines in 1954 with the famous Himalayan expedition by Achille Compagnoni, Lino Lacedelli, Walter Bonatti and Amir Mahdi. The team reached the summit of the K2 wearing Dolomite boots with Vibram soles. It was an all-round success: a competitive milestone and a debut for the Alpine sole but also the beginning of a new era – safer and more innovative – in the history of mountaineering. Resistant to abrasion and traction, and with excellent grip, they proved perfect for military use: “In those days, I remember, I made a supply for the Aosta battalion. Now all NATO members have my soles”, said the founder of Vibram, who also supplied them to the Royal Italian Army during the Second World War, to the Monte Cervino Alpine Skiers and, still today, to the US Marines. Inspired by the innovations of Pirelli products, the highly versatile Vibram sole has conquered markets all over the world, one step at a time, ever since. And not just in the world of sport: from customisation for specific outdoor activities to motorcycling, to city life and high fashion, the golden yellow octagon also appears on brands such as Ferragamo, Pollini, The Northface and many others. Just as Pirelli tyres leave their characteristic mark, depending on the model, so each sole is associated with its own tread (Accademica, Alpina and Aprica for the mountains; Belpasso, Viavai, and Lungarno for strolling; Ripple for “an elastic step”; Levanto for those who go for good looks).

It’s a never-ending story. A success of innovation and creativity that is always on the move, like the companies that made it come true.

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”.