Rome (NEV), February 27, 2020 – 60 years ago, the Carnival of the orange battle was not celebrated in Ivrea. The Piedmontese city was in mourning, because on the 27th of February 1960 Adriano Olivetti died in Switzerland, during a train travel from Milan to Lausanne.
“We have brought our secret weapons to all villages: books, courses, works of genius and art. We believe in the revolutionary virtue of culture that gives man his true power”. These historical words were chosen by the Foundation named after him to promote one of the many initiatives in memory and in the wake of the great industrialist, the “Olivetti Lessons”.
Adriano Olivetti was born in Ivrea, in Piedmont, in 1901, son of Camillo, a Jew, and of Luisa Revel, a Waldensian. The entrepreneur’s grandfather, Luisa’s father, was the pastor of Ivrea, Daniele dei Revel from Torre Pellice. Thanks to a Waldensian certificate of baptism he managed to escape the anti-Semitic persecutions.
Olivetti’s story repeatedly intertwined with the Protestant world – and above all with its ethics -. In fact, he was a friend of another anti-fascist engineer, a Waldensian hero, Guglielmo known as Willy Jervis, who became a member of the National Liberation Committee in the Ivrea plant after September 8, 1943.
There are many stages, many moments that went down in the history of the Country, recalled in the personal and industrial biography of the philanthropist. In 1945 he published “The political order of the Communities”, in which he theorized an organization of the Country based on culturally homogeneous and economically autonomous territorial units (the “Community”); in 1948 he founded the “Community Movement” in Turin, striving to achieve his vision of “Community” in the Canavese area (Turin); in 1953 he opened a factory in Pozzuoli (Naples) and in 1956 Olivetti reduced working hours from 48 to 45 per week for the same wages, thus anticipating what would later be achieved at national level with collective agreements of work.
But behind all these achievements and innovations there was above all a revolutionary and yet practicable thought. In a passage from the speech given in 1956 on the occasion of the VI Congress of the National Urban Planning Institute, published in 1959 with the title “We dream of silence”, Olivetti states: “I would not say with this that our discipline postulates impossible revolutions and go forward on the treacherous paths of utopia”. The Ivrea manager wanted to “make the factory and the surrounding environment economically supportive” aware that the working place is not “a pure economic organism, but a social organism that influences the life of those who contribute to its efficiency and development”.
The community Zygmunt Bauman will call the ‘desire for community’ or ‘the community that comes’ as Giorgio Agamben will say in 1990.
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