(ANSA) - BUCAREST, 05 FEB - 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. (ANSA).