ABSTRACT
When, in 1872, he founded the company that to this very day still bears his family name on its corporate website, Giovanni Battista Pirelli was twenty-four years old. He had graduated just two years before from the Politecnico di Milano (the Polytechnic University of Milan), just before spending some months abroad, travelling throughout Europe in order to decide upon a promising new business to start up on his return in patria. It was not an easy task. Within two decades, Italy would have been rightly considered one of the most effective examples of a latecomer country, one which had successfully proven itself able to undergo a process of industrial and social modernisation. But, at the beginning of the 1870s, it was a country that had only just completed the process of its political unification (Rome, the capital, had been militarily annexed to the newborn Italian state in September 1870, when Pirelli had just set off on his modern version of the Grand Tour or “training tour” across the Continent). It was a country in which agriculture was the dominant sector, and manufacturing activity was either of an artisanal nature, or based upon networks of peasants employed mainly in the textile industry. According to some calculations, on the eve of the Unification of Italy with the annexation of Rome in 1870, in both Piedmont and Lombardy – the two most economically developed regions of the country – more than half of the total value of exports came from staple products such as raw silk, which – produced in the countryside by peasants as raw material for textile manufacture – worked as a trait d’union between the primary and secondary sectors.
