“Those who don't read at the age of 70 will have lived only one life: their own. The reader will have lived 5000 years. It was there when Cain killed Abel, when Renzo married Lucia, when Leopardi admired the infinite because reading is an immortality backwards”. With this quote from Umberto Eco, Antonio Calabrò, director of the Pirelli Foundation, opened the meeting organized in the Pirelli headquarters at Bicocca in front of an audience of 300 Milanese middle school students on the importance of "teaming up with books” in the classroom, in sport and in life, an event that is part of the #ioleggoperché week. Enlivening the meeting, chatting with the youngsters and urging them to read and play with books, was Javier Zanetti with Luigi Garlando from the Gazzetta dello Sport, the Inter captain of the Treble, Regina Baresi, one of the best interpreters of the women's soccer, and Mario Isola, the manager of Formula 1 and Car Racing Pirelli, three personalities who have made teamwork their strong point in their professional lives.
Spreading a passion for reading in children and young people by collaborating with local schools and with public and private institutions to create a real system of company, school and neighborhood libraries has always been a goal of the Pirelli Foundation, which carries it out in agreement with the Italian Publishers Association – present at the event with its president Ricardo Franco Levi – and with the Municipality (represented, for the occasion, by Laura Galomberti, councilor for Education and Education of Palazzo Marino.
A commitment that comes from afar because Pirelli has been active in the dissemination of reading and culture in the workplace for over a hundred years. In the wake of the tradition that saw it open the first company library in 1928, the company now has a library at the Pirelli Industrial Center in Settimo Torinese and two libraries – one in the Milan Bicocca headquarters and one in the Bollate factory – inaugurated on the occasion of #ioleggoperché in 2016.
In 2018, then, Pirelli was the first company to join the Milan Library System (Sbm), offering its employees the opportunity to choose from over a million materials including books, magazines and audiovisuals directly from the libraries of the Milanese circuit and collect them at the Bicocca company library, which already boasts a heritage of over 6000 books. Pirelli's book heritage is also made up of the Technical-Scientific Library, composed of about 16 volumes on rubber and cable technology from the XNUMXth century to the present day, and by Library of the Pirelli Foundation, with over 2 volumes on the history of the company, corporate communication, art, architecture, sport and much more.
These last two libraries are available to the public, students and researchers at the Pirelli Foundation, established in 2008. The Foundation, which houses a historical archive of over 3,5 kilometers of documentation on the company's history from 1872 to today , has as its main objective that of promoting and spreading knowledge of this heritage through projects such as exhibitions, publications, guided tours, conferences and, in the educational field, creative and training courses aimed at schools and institutes of various types and levels.
The meeting with the students at Bicocca ended with the donation and loan to the Giovanni Verga middle school in Milan of over 300 volumes which will enrich the school library.
