Milan is a city which, if it has continuously shed its skin, retains in its memory traces of the identity of an industrial city, evidence of its continuous process of social and economic transformation. And Milan was the protagonist of the evening of Thursday 15 November, when, in the Auditorium of the Pirelli Headquarters, the actors Marina Rocco and Rosario Lisma interpreted some excerpts from novels about Milan and texts taken from the historical magazine "Pirelli": from Dino Buzzati to Alda Merini, from Giorgio Scerbanenco to Alberto Savinio, and again Ottiero Ottieri, Giorgio Fontana and Alberto Rollo. The show was organized by the Pirelli Foundation and the Franco Parenti Theater, in collaboration with the University of Milan-Bicocca, a multi-voiced dialogue in which the readings of the two actors intertwined with the words of Antonio Calabrò, director of the Pirelli Foundation, Piero Colaprico, journalist and writer, Giuseppe Lupo, writer and professor at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, and Pietro Redondi, professor at the University of Milan-Bicocca.
The evening was an opportunity to listen – for the first time – to some excerpts from the screenplay of “This is our city”, a neo-realist melodrama written by Alberto Moravia in 1947 and preserved in the Pirelli Historical Archive. The film, which was not subsequently made, was then commissioned by Alberto Pirelli for the company's XNUMXth anniversary and should have been directed by Roberto Rossellini. In the text Moravia describes the daily life of industrial Milan through the Pirelli Bicocca factory of the XNUMXs: “Here is the Pirelli factory. Workers converse from all sides in the square facing the porter's lodge, among the fruit carts and the cigarette vendors' stalls. A weak autumn sun plays on the square and on the walls of the Pirelli. The workers line up, go to store the bicycle in the warehouse, under the shed, and then each go to their own department.”
Pirelli's bond with Milan goes back almost 150 years. The first Pirelli factory was built in Milan, in via Ponte Seveso in 1872, while in 1909 the Milan-Bicocca factory was inaugurated. Eighty years later, in place of the factory establishments, the new district was developed, by Studio Gregotti, after an international competition organized by Pirelli and where now there is also the University of Milan Bicocca and since 2004 the Pirelli HangarBicocca, one of the most important contemporary art exhibition spaces in the world.
The history of this transformation of Milan – and of the entire company – is kept by the Pirelli Foundation, established in 2008 with the aim of promoting and spreading knowledge of the historical heritage of the company through projects such as exhibitions, guided tours, conferences on history of business and work and, in the educational field, creative and training courses aimed at schools and institutes of various types and levels. The Pirelli Foundation holds a historical archive of over 3,5 km of documentation on the history of Pirelli from its foundation in 1872 to the present day, and preserves the complete collection of Pirelli. Information and technical magazine, which can be consulted both in paper form and on the website www.fondazionepirelli.org. Published from 1948 to 1972 and regularly distributed on newsstands, the magazine welcomes technical-scientific dissemination contributions on the progress of industry and technology alongside unpublished interventions ranging from art to architecture, from sociology to economics, from urban planning to literature.
