There are people who share a special relationship with the horizon. As though they could never fix their gaze on what lies before them, as though they possessed an innate need to look beyond, across both space and time. Adriano Olivetti was one of them, and this was reflected in the way he understood his role as an industrialist:
“Can industry have purposes of its own? Are these to be found simply in the measure of profits? Beyond the apparent rhythm, is there not a vocation, a destiny, even in the life of a factory?”
Adriano was born in Ivrea on 11 April 1901 to a Jewish father, Camillo Olivetti, and a Waldensian mother, Luisa Revel. He grew up in a secular environment where books, nature, and outdoor play occupied a central place. Perhaps for this reason, his first experience in a factory, at the age of fourteen, proved almost traumatic.
He studied Chemical Engineering at the Polytechnic University of Turin during years when workers occupied factories with revolutionary ambitions. He wrote for socialist journals such as L’Azione Riformista and Tempi Nuovi, and associated with thinkers including Piero Gobetti.
Then came Fascism. In 1926, together with Sandro Pertini, Ferruccio Parri, and Carlo Rosselli, he took part in the escape to France of the Socialist Party Secretary Filippo Turati, who was being pursued by the Fascist political police.
He joined the company. He visited 105 American factories to study the latest methods of mass production and bring them to Ivrea. From his father he received both approval and a warning:
“You may do anything you wish, except dismiss anyone because of the introduction of the new methods, for involuntary unemployment is the greatest evil afflicting the working class.”
Adriano became General Manager in 1932 and Chairman in 1938. Under his leadership, Olivetti expanded across both the Italian and international markets.
Accused of “collaboration with the enemy”, he was imprisoned in Rome in 1943, but managed to escape and sought refuge in Switzerland. There he wrote L’ordine politico delle Comunità, in which he proposed a model of society founded on concrete communities, “the product of nature and history”, federated and open.
In 1946, he returned to lead the company. Within a relatively short time, he transformed it into an international leader in the fields of typewriting and mechanical calculating machines.
The Movimento Comunità, the journal Comunità, and the Edizioni di Comunità publishing house were established as political and cultural instruments for the modernisation of Italy. By then, Ivrea had become a social laboratory for building a new kind of community, a sort of third way “alternative to both capitalism and socialism”. As Geno Pampaloni wrote:
“Adriano Olivetti worked outside the frameworks of official culture. On the one hand, he drew on the Christian-social tradition; on the other, on the utopian-anarchist one.”
He died suddenly on 27 February 1960 aboard a train bound for Switzerland.
In 1962, the Adriano Olivetti Foundation was established to preserve and carry forward his thought.
