San Giorgio, decline of the former Pininfarina area: “Years of not very concrete requests”

The hypothesis of the Intel settlement, which now seems to focus on the area between Volpiano and Settimo, has vanished

SAN GIORGIO CANAVESE. The former Pininfarina plant in San Giorgio Canavese has also taken the path of decline. With the disappearance of the hypothesis of the establishment of Intel, the US multinational, leader in the production of microchips (which seems to orient itself between Volpiano and Settimo), the degradation advances in what was once one of the most important companies in the Canavese area, from which the Pininfarina bodied cars came out and which employed about 600 employees (later down to 150) in an area of ​​300 thousand square meters. The entrance gates are rusty, the brambles slip everywhere and erase the memory. «Some news – the mayor Andrea Zanusso merely says – could arrive in September. In fact, there are requests, in the manufacturing sector, under consideration by the Piedmont Region and the Mise which, however, await confirmation. For years, requests have been received: however, nothing has so far materialized ».

In the meantime, the industrial site along the Caluso-Ozegna provincial road, inaugurated in 1990, has been decommissioned for eleven years. Now the sale of the complex is entrusted to a real estate company, the Ipi of Turin. Pininfarina knew its glory days in the 1980s, when it proudly defined the plant as a “telematic factory in which control functions are entrusted to a network of computers”. After all, the models produced were worthy of the best technologies and the utmost care, being jewels such as the Ferrari Testarossa and the Cadillac Allanté, the latter daughter of an absurd airlift that provided for the shipment of the bodies from Caselle to Detroit aboard Boeing 747. An adventure that ended in San Giorgio in the autumn of 2011, after a year spent between strikes and labor disputes with the few remaining workers leaving the factory. The last models produced, after the Peugeot 406 Coupé, were the Alfa Romeo Brera and Spider (which perhaps deserved a better commercial fate) and the Ford Focus CC. The Pininfarina company, on the other hand, still exists and was recently bought by the Indian Mahindra. Today the last surviving piece of Pininfarina is in Cambiano, where about 300 employees still work and where yet another agreement for the exit of ten workers has just been closed, after the management had declared 14 redundancies.

The history of Pininfarina begins on May 22, 1930, when the “Società Anonima Carrozzeria Pinin Farina” was founded by the brothers Battista (called Pinin, in Piedmontese) and Giovanni Farina, partners Giovanni Battista Devalle, Gaspare Bona (first president), Pietro Monateri, Arrigo De Angeli and Vincenzo Lancia. Founded as a small artisan company for the construction of bodywork for wealthy private customers, over the years it has become an industry capable of offering complete vehicle designs to the automotive market, even with the application of advanced engineering research. Pinin Farina, for example, is the first to take a concrete interest in aerodynamics, his son Sergio will bring a more engineering approach to the industry. The “take-off” of the company was recorded after the Second World War, when Pininfarina conceived the first car of global fame, the Cristalia 202, which “debuted” even at the MoMA in New York. Since that moment, the Turin-based company flies very high in the world, signing hundreds of cars, many of which are very famous. In 1961 the company passed under the leadership of Sergio Pininfarina, but in the meantime it has already started collaboration with foreign companies and is becoming a real industrial reality. The San Giorgio Canavese and Bairo plants opened in 1990, when Pininfarina became a full-fledged car manufacturer. In the 2000s, the Pininfarina production model went into crisis. The large builders are making their assembly lines flexible and orders are dwindling. The balance sheets of the Turin-based company start to run out and the debt grows out of all proportion. Of the three production plants, the only one still in business is that of Bairo. –