The Italian Embassy and the
Italian Cultural Institute in Bucharest, in collaboration with
the ICE Romania Agency, opened today, at the National Library of
Romania, in the Symposium Hall (Bd. Unirii 22, Bucharest), the
exhibition "L'Universo Olivetti. Community as a concrete
utopia." Speakers at the opening included Laura Napolitano,
director of the Italian Cultural Institute in Bucharest, Pippo
Ciorra of the MAXXI Foundation and Beniamino de' Liguori Carino,
secretary general of the Olivetti Foundation. Organized in
collaboration with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and
International Cooperation (MAECI), the Olivetti Foundation and
the MAXXI Foundation (National Museum of XXI Century Arts) and
curated by Pippo Ciorra, Francesca Limana and Matilde Trevisani,
the exhibition recounts the Olivetti project in all its aspects
and complexity. Between the 1930s and 1960s, Adriano Olivetti
realized, through the factory in Ivrea (a city recently
inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List), the ideal of a
visionary landscape in which industrial and technical
modernization was combined with an innovative reorganization of
the territory and social space. Ivrea and the Canavese region
thus become a laboratory where culture, technological research,
design, architecture and sustainability are integrated in a
unique and innovative model of the relationship between business
and society, considered, even today, exemplary. Structured in
four thematic sections - City and Politics, Factory, Culture and
Image, and Society - the exhibition traces the history of an
Italian company that has spanned almost a century, condensing
the great themes of the 20th century and becoming an expression
of the best 'made in Italy' products. Innovation, product
quality and the company's development on international markets
combine with excellence in architecture and industrial design.
In the Olivetti universe, the factory is the engine of Adriano
Olivetti's reforming project, which is at once entrepreneurial,
political, cultural and social. Adriano Olivetti gathers around
him the most capable people of post-war Italy: architects,
philosophers, designers, intellectuals and engineers, who lead
the company, right from the mid-1950s, to found, on the one
hand, an Olivetti "style" , and on the other hand to take the
first pioneering steps towards the development of electronics
and then of information technology with the first personal
computer. Among the first to realize its potential were Nasa
scientists who used it to complete maps of the moon and to plot
the trajectory of the Apollo 11 mission, which took man to the
moon in 1969. The exhibit will remain on display at the National
Library in Bucharest until March 8, 2023.
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