of the fashion brand Tod’s Group, relies on local craftsmen from Casette d’Ete, a region on the country’s east coast, where his company’s main factory is located.) But many of the best-known towns that orbit around a single industry or company can seem decidedly un-Italian: There is no ancient architecture or grand cultural tradition because much of what remains of their history is contained almost exclusively within the 20th century. (There are still company towns in Italy - the designer Brunello Cucinelli has spent the last 30 years restoring the Umbrian hamlet of Solomeo to serve as his eponymous company’s headquarters, and Diego Della Valle, C.E.O. Colleferro, a dreary town just outside of Rome built around a munitions factory that closed in 1968, has been plagued for the last 70 years by occasional explosions. The main draw of Rosignano Solvay, established in 1912 in southern Tuscany, for instance, is its beautiful white sand beaches, the blanching of the sand a result of toxic chemical waste from the still-operational Solvay plant, which gave the town its name. At the dawn of the 20th century, and in a rapidly industrializing Italy especially, the fortunes of various small towns were, and for the most part remain, inextricably linked to private companies. In Europe, however, the company town had its roots in the model estates of the Victorian era, where wealthy landowners housed workers and caretakers in paltry accommodations. Though it was a failure, his ideas of increased welfare provision became more common and acceptable in Italian politics.
Instead, in 1946, he formed his own political party, Il Movimento Comunità, which was intended to shift power to the diverse social bases and competences of a broadly conceived community, away from the patronage and bureaucracy encouraged by Italy’s political parties, thereby charting a new course for not only the country but for the entire modern age.
Olivetti was a devout Christian and a socialist, but he was distant from the two main political parties, the Christian Democrats and the Communists, that occupied these poles in midcentury Italy. He hired famous designers to work on his products, making some of them, such as the 1949 Lettera 22 typewriter and the 1958 Elea 9003 mainframe computer, into icons of design. He was a self-taught student of city planning, and he read extensively the architectural and urbanist literature of the day. Adriano, born in 1901, was a businessman of unusually wide learning, with strong inclinations toward humanism. It would be a model for the nation, and for the world.Īll of this was the initiative of Adriano Olivetti, who had inherited the company from his father, Camillo, who founded it in the early 20th century. Italy’s best Modernist architects would be hired to design in the Modernist style: Factories, canteens, offices and study areas would be airy palaces of glass curtain walls, flat concrete roofs and glazed brick tile. July would be a time of holiday, so that workers with homes in the surrounding countryside could tend to small farms - it was important to the company that workers not feel a division between city and country.
ABANDONED MOVIE FREE
Their children would receive free day care, and expecting mothers would be granted 10 months maternity leave. They would be housed, if they liked, in Olivetti-constructed modern homes and apartments. They were given the opportunity to take classes at an on-site sale and trade school their lunchtime hours would be filled with speeches or performances from visiting dignitaries (actors, musicians, poets) and they would receive a substantial pension upon retirement. Olivetti, a renowned designer and manufacturer of typewriters and accounting machines, decided to provide for its employees through retirement. IN THE 1950S, the small town of Ivrea, which is about an hour’s train ride north of Turin, became the site of an unheralded experiment in living and working.
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