The molding company is in its third generation of entrepreneurs. Heart of the mountain production, in Corio. 116 employees, divided into two factories
CORIO CANAVESE
The progenitor was Severino Canavera. It was the year 1935. The company was born there, where the heart is still today, along the Malone, in Corio Canavese, where the power of water was strategic to give energy and driving force to the machines. Almost ninety years later, Canavera & Audi is in its third generation. Giovanni Devietti remembers when, as a child, he was with his grandfather in the spaces where there are still the mallets today.
“My mother told me that, at nine, she was able to operate the lever to activate the mallet,” he says. Rosetta Canavera is the cousin and with Severino Canavera, grandson of the founder, and Giovanni Devietti manages the company. Every so often, Rosetta Canavera finds some old photos or documents, such as the image of the factory after the bombing of 1944. Fragments of the past. And today it is impressive that right from there, in the most remote corner of the Canavese, at 625 meters above sea level, reachable through narrow streets that force the bison of the road to a slow pace, printed pieces leave that end up in trains and subways thousands of kilometers away. Lima, Honolulu, Washington, just to give some examples.
Canavera and Audi made its debut in 1935 and, after the war, it experienced a great moment of expansion by becoming a supplier of the railways. Today the sector is still a driving force for the company even if, since the end of the Eighties, with the changing market conditions, it has differentiated by also focusing on industrial vehicles and earth-moving machinery. In two words, with globalization and the low-cost production of some pieces, in the most specialized Italian companies there remains the molding of the most precious pieces, those with the greatest added value, those that are born from precise molds and modeled in the nearby workshop, where the drawings become prototypes and then reality.
The molding, in Canavera and Audi, is done with hammers. Hammers that, thanks to the molds, hit the hot steel and become pieces that, once assembled, give life to railway carriages, trolleys, subways, petrochemical machines. A mountain company that produces pieces that end up in the world seems like a 21st century contradiction. But this is not the case. «There was a certain point in which our predecessors – says Devietti – evaluated the transfer to the plains, but it did not happen. And it is better this way ». Hot forging companies are impactful and very complicated to move. “The bases that support the hammers go down into the rock – underlines Dino Devietti – even up to fifteen meters”. The regular blows of the mallets crash into the hot steel. And they feel. Rosetta Canavera says that, as a child, she lived in an accommodation above the factory. And those who know that portion of Canavese where these processes are predominant know of the sometimes difficult coexistence in the towns.
One hundred and sixteen employees today in Canavera and Audi, in two factories. In addition to that of Corio there is Cafasse, dedicated to carpentry. In factories Canavera and Audi, metal and sheets take shape. «We have done and still do various things – observes Rosetta Canavera -. For example, pieces for the roofing of the mosque in Algiers came out of our carpentry ».
Along the road, at the end of the valley, there is the factory with the mallets. Shortly before a large workshop where the molded pieces are finished and processed. And even before that, a laboratory for safety tests: the molded pieces must pass tests of resistance, resilience, torsion, before becoming a gear that seems anonymous (but it is not) of a wagon or a truck. In the warehouse, the trucks enter to load the boxes with the packaged pieces. Above, the labels with the destinations.
The pandemic? 2020 was filled with uncertainties. 2021 pushes. The work is organized in two shifts, the plants are operational from 6 am to 10 pm, the excitement in the sector is very high, as confirmed by the projections of Euroforge, the body that monitors the situation in Europe. The workers of Canavera and Audi arrive from a radius of about thirty kilometers, including Turin. There is no big one turn over of the staff. The factory guarantees stability. Of course, in front of the mallet the work is hard and it is not easy to find personnel to train.