Talking about “Maccaferri” is like telling the story of a city, Bellizzi, which grew practically in symbiosis with “its” factory. Sheds inside the town and the town inside the sheds. An identity relationship that broke the day before last night when, by videoconference, the gates of the factory were closed in front of the 32 workers and the entire community. The “Maccaferri” demobilized, turns off the machines and hopes; breaks that link with the city that began in February 1953 when the “workshops” were inaugurated. An event that marked the history of Bellizzi which became an independent municipality many years later, in February 1990.
The Maccaferri brothers were also awarded the honorary citizenship of Bellizzi; and the mayor Volpe himself, for years at the helm of the center of the Piana del Sele, wanted the factory to remain in the heart of the town, in via Roma, despite the health and environmental problems that this choice entailed. “I took this responsibility – he says – in order to avoid closure”.
On the other side of the province, in Fratte, a suburb of Salerno, there are the Pisano Foundries. Here, unlike the “Maccaferri”, the relationship between factory, citizens and territory was anything but symbiotic. The plant opened its doors in 1961 and, due to production needs, occupied an area with an industrial vocation (there were the Southern Cotton Manufacturers and other factories) up to the current 180 thousand square meters of surface. The urban expansion of the area has been chaotic and often uncontrolled for years. And not only on the “bank” of the Municipality of Salerno: on the other side of the river Irno the residential districts of Pellezzano were born, thousands of rooms just a few meters away from the foundries. While, downstream of the factory, in place of the MCM, a large shopping center was built.
The conflict was inevitable, provoked – it must be strongly emphasized – by an absence of territorial planning on the part of the Municipalities of Salerno and Pellezzano, which made the factory incompatible with the rest of the territory. The Pisano Foundries have recently acquired a lot in the industrial area of Buccino where production will be transferred: a new state-of-the-art plant will be built – they assure – which will bring economic well-being and work to the Cratere area where industrialization
Two stories, two industrial realities with different genesis and perspectives: Maccaferri which bypasses the layoffs imposed by Covid by closing its factory with a chain and padlock; Pisano, on the other hand, who chooses to relocate production to an industrial area, however, finding himself faced with a wall of hostility from a local political and administrative class that imagines the government of its territory as “exclusive”, in the literal sense of the term. Two stories, however, which re-propose the ever-current theme of constitutionally guaranteed rights to work and business (as well as that of health).
It is no longer the time of the great enlightened entrepreneurs who made the “times” of the factory coincide with the social and urban development of the cities. Two examples above all: Lanerossi in Schio and Olivetti in Ivrea.
In the town in the province of Vicenza – for years referred to as the Manchester of Italy – Alessandro Rossi built, at the end of the 19th century, a real “civitas” around his textile industry. The working-class district was born, the “Nuova Schio”, designed by the urban planner Antonio Caregaro Negrin, inspired by the Belgian and French cities. Small villas were built for managers and technicians, houses for the workers, the school, the kindergarten, the church. The factory became the village, the country the factory.
And then Adriano Olivetti and his Ivrea: around and inside the plant he created a real network of social services (industrial buildings, offices, houses for employees, canteens, kindergartens) for workers in an area spread over 70 thousand hectares. usable by all. And to create it, Olivetti turned to the best Italian architects: Figini, Pollini, Zanuso, Vittoria, Gardella, Fiocchi, Cosenza.
A model of utopian city that clashes with the current reality: shapeless industrial areas, often without services, expanses of anonymous, alienating warehouses. In short, the “humanization” of the factory is missing, that symbiosis between the city and its productive fabric that we pay today with the new concrete pours of residential complexes instead of industrial machines.
This is why the stories of Maccaferri and Pisano can become, despite their specificity, a moment of confrontation and serious and concrete debate on how to imagine our future, our relationship with work, development and the environment that surrounds us. A debate necessary to make those rights of Work, Business, Health – the foundations of our young democracy coincide. Otherwise we will be condemned forever to arbitrariness and oppression, to the indiscriminate exploitation of the territory, to the alienation of production. Sentenced to one, one hundred, one thousand Maccaferri.