92 human, all too human There is a scene, in Michelangelo Antonioni's La Notte, in which the successful writer Giovanni Pontano, played by Marcello Mastroianni, is in conversation with the equally successful industrialist Mr. Gherardini, who proposes him to become a manager of his company because he intends to build a bridge between entrepreneurs and workers through humanistic culture. To Pontano's perplexities, Mr. Gherardini replies: «But excuse me, haven’t you ever wanted to become independent?». In 1961, when the Ferrarese director's masterpiece was released in cinemas, Adriano Olivetti had just died, but the famous journalist, writer and politician Furio Colombo, who worked alongside him, remembers that in Olivetti he experienced that kind of independence Mr. Gherardini was talking about: «I worked at the factory, presses and assembly lines, because Adriano asked me to do this, before taking on the job of selecting the personnel for which he wanted me in Ivrea. "How do you take care of the people who come to work, if you don't know what the black of Monday is in the life of a worker?", he told me. The workers knew very well that I was not a worker, but they wanted to be precise in teaching, and celebrated small successes (keeping time, finishing the piece). In return, I used to serially tell them novels» Furio Colombo, La comunità civile di Adriano Olivetti, Il Fatto �uotidiano, 01/21/2013 The human, all too human commitment of Adriano Olivetti, chemical engineer, was always aimed at enriching his employees with humanism and humanity, careful as he was in hiring figures who knew how to think independently and obliquely, in a fruitful exchange: to to do this, Olivetti used to hire trios of graduates – an economist, a technician and a humanist – in order to preserve the richness of interdisciplinary dialogue within his factory. A new Renaissance, Adriano as Lorenzo, within a new court, that of the company, capable of combining art with technique, architecture with engineering, aesthetics with capital, according to the dictates of the Artistic Capitalism and actively contributing to the worldly diffusion of Made in Italy as beautiful and well made, keeping central the value of the person, of any person, who was making it possible, for twenty truly neo-Renaissant years. At the court of Adriano, buildings designed by Figini and Pollini, Luigi Cosenza, Carlo Scarpa, Gino Valle, Gabetti and Isola, Ignazio Gardella, BBPR, Ludovico �uaroni, Marco Zanuso, and there would have been another, had he not gone away too soon – the Usine Verte in Rho – already designed by Le Corbusier. Showrooms set up by Gae Aulenti, Franco Albini and Franca Helg, Gian Antonio Bernasconi. Products designed by Ettore Sottsass, Bruno Munari, Marcello Nizzoli, Mario Bellini, Giovanni Pintori and the same Enzo Mari, recently deceased and very close to Adriano, who wrote the Barcelona Manifesto (1999) declaring that ethics is the goal of every project. Artworks commissioned to Costantino Nivola and Renato Guttuso, historical photographic documentation signed by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Gianni Berengo Gardin, Ugo Mulas, Gabriele Basilico, Mimmo Jodice, Mario Dondero, Fulvio Roiter, Francesc Catala-Roca; for Comunità, one of the magazines released by his publishing house, pens of the caliber of Carl Gustav Jung, Giulio Carlo Argan, Thomas Mann, Alberto Moravia, Fernanda Pivano, Eugenio Montale, Goffredo Parise, Ignazio Silone, Thomas Stern Eliot, Oscar Niemeyer, Cesare Pavese, Enrico Fermi, Norberto Bobbio wrote. In an era such as ours, morbid and posthuman, in which the sensitivity of the governments ruled by the sovereign index of GDP directs actions only towards sectors in immediate relation to economic growth – to the detriment of the ferocious cutting of artistic and humanistic subjects within school policies – we find ourselves immersed in the conflictual paradigm of the two cultures, the technical-scientific and the artistic-humanistic ones, as the scientist Charles P. Snow defined it. Yet, as Adriano understood, humanistic education strengthens that capacity for imagination and independent thinking, a guarantee of success in the field of innovation, which is fundamental in the objective of economic growth of a fast and light society, therefore inevitably mutable. Thinking about Adriano Olivetti, which court he belonged to, Umberto Eco recalled how Olivetti «realized that engineers are indispensable for conceiving hardware, but to invent new software, a mind educated on the adventures of creativity, exerted on literature and philosophy, was needed» (Umberto Eco, "Chiudiamo il liceo classico?", L'Espresso, 11/28/2014). Moreover, in order to understand the complexity that surrounds us and to defend ourselves from various and possible propaganda/fake/negationist domestications, critical maturity is vital like the air we breathe. A kind of maturity that only the exercise of thought and introspection, cornerstones of humanistic baggage, can breed. It was by caressing this awareness that Adriano Olivetti played a fundamental role in post-war Italian publishing, supporting newspapers which he never took the liberty to influence in their free thought or
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