I'd love to go back and take a tour.
It's a ruin now.[1]
I was not aware of the rich history of the company.
Gates saw Olivetti as a customer for his MSDOS. Jobs saw Sottsass+Olivetti as a design inspiration.
Italy has both megalopoleis and very sparse small centres. Ivrea is in the northern part of its region (north of Turin); if you consider that the southern half is said to not really have a main city but seven towns of equal beauty and worth (the even lesser ones not really minor), you get the idea of the sub-region as a very sparse megalopolis embedding its countryside.
When enterprises chose to move at least part of their activity from their town of origin to the central area (of Turin) for logistic convenience, it became sensible to organize systems facilitating the movement of your workers, that easily gravitated around the original town.
Edit: as you wrote elsewhere, «[there is a] city to have a job in but then you'd go home [when possible] if you could».
Many (most?) of the Italians did not like it but it was work. They really wanted to be home. Same with Milan, a city to have a job in but then you'd go home on weekends if you could.
- Worker's social club, complete with pool
- subsidized housing at cost, rent-to-own
- a wholesale "majorista" style shop where they'd buy in bulk and sell to workers' families at cost.
Say what you want about the fault of paternalism, at least they were thinking about employee welfare. Argentina's economy sucked at the time and they had to close. The factory now produces cigarettes under a phillip morris subsidiary (iirc).
If they had held it, Italy would be playing a much larger role in embedded electronics.
https://www.elleeseymour.com/2012/02/24/how-olivetti-stitche...
Utopia, Abandoned: The Olivetti Town - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20864548 - Sept 2019 (24 comments)
Ivrea, industrial city of the 20th century
https://artsandculture.google.com/story/ivrea-industrial-cit...
Carlo De Benedetti is no random john doe. They basically led the decline of olivetti.
They had no vision for the company , and they actually were antagonists to it: Olivetti was an exceptional company that proved wrong both left and right, but proved particularly wrong the left, and they just couldn’t bear it. They just couldn’t bear the living example that it is possible to run a company in a capitalistic manner while also caring for the human beings and treating them well.
So they dismembered it, little by little.
You’re obsessed folks, calm down
This works for a while - you'll lose your best and brightest, who have no patience for this game, but with enough process layered on top of an unskilled workforce, you can get really far (as Amazon's warehouses can show).
The traditional left here has been and still is extremely detrimental to the country as a whole and has kept from their communist roots - that’s where most of the old guard has been formed - an extremely strong tendency towards control where they would rather destroy anything successful not coming from them than see it prosper. It’s even more sad in France because the main left wing party used to be dominated by its social democrat wing and be somewhat apt to govern but is now decimated and subservient to other more extreme parties which are completely disconnected from reality. Not that the right is any better. They are more and more fascist by the day.
We are on a trajectory to do the same mistakes Italy did.
Italy, I understand, also had had a tradition of conciliation and search for common grounds, a call to the common good. (A drive helped by the fight against a common enemy before the half of the past century.)
The grave mistake is polarization, those steps towards a "cold civil war" (that seems now so common around the world).
But before that, allowing the twisted stagnate in their dumb lowly positions (like said taste for «destr[uction]» and «disconnect[ion] from reality»), in the disgregation of the societal spirit - a root of the abovesaid polarization. It is a lurking entropic phenomenon requiring active correction, normally through debate, through "talking", productive confrontation; it is not absent in these pages.