Monday 18 May 2015, in Milan, at 6.30 pm, at the Museum of Science and Technology, the exhibition “Make in Italy: 50 years of Italian innovation, from the P101 to the first spatial espresso machine” opens.
The exhibition actually opened its doors on May 1st, coinciding with the great Milanese Expo, and was divided between two places: the TIM pavilion of the Expo site and the Museum, where the most significant objects were located. .
“Make in Italy” was a foundation that we had created the previous year with Carlo De Benedetti and Massimo Banzi. The idea was to become a platform to support Italian “makers” and the new made in Italy enabled by digital. But for various reasons we were not up to the challenge.
However, we managed to organize that exhibition which exhibited some of the most beautiful and significant things done by Italian “makers” in the last 50 years: from the Valentine (Olivetti’s red typewriter) to Unica, the super machine of Technogym; from the first Intel microprocessor to those of Arduino; from the “common rail” from FIAT to the Copenhagen wheel by Carlo Ratti. The exhibition, which had been organized by Alberto Luna and designed in the staging by those dotdotdot magicians, was also well received by critics.
It had a preview in Rome, on the occasion of the Maker Faire, with the cutting of the ribbon by Samantha Cristoforetti who had actually experimented with the space espresso machine during the Futura mission on the ISS.
In Milan, in the museum directed by Fiorenzo Galli, the cutting of the ribbon was done by the genius of Federico Faggin. To see it again today, it was a nice, colorful, fun but basically small exhibition and it left the feeling of a country where some once in a while had actually done exceptional things but we didn’t realize it there and then.