Inaugurated on 15 May 2008, in the twenty two specially-created rooms in the Società Promotrice delle Belle Arti of Torino, the exhibition "Olivetti: una bella società" certainly marks one of the most significant moments in the calendar of Torino 2008 World Design Capital. The synergetical impetus of the two curators, Enrico Morteo and Manolo De Giorgi, accompanied by the Archivio Storico Olivetti, the Fondazione Adriano Olivetti and the Laboratorio Museo Tecnologic@mente, the town of Ivrea and the Province of Torino, has provided an itinerary which is not history, celebration or a catalogue, but a visual and audio atmosphere, the spark to re-create links between apparently unrelated elements, bringing out moments of history, culture and design that were real turning points in a development that followed a thousand paths. In an ever-changing show of more than twenty presentations dedicated to themes treated with synthetic lucidity, from the "machine objects" that surface from the dark in their evolution from mechanical instruments to well-loved and still significant design objects, to the "social landscape" represented in its web of relations with the local area, the factory, personalities and people, the "architecture" unveiled, surrounding the visitor in projections in which the visitors' gaze can grasp the essence of places designed to create work, invent, teach and spread culture. Sound and vision then recount a factory of advertising, communication and images, information and lessons, the reconstruction of Carlo Scarpa's famous shop in Venice, a jungle of photographs depicting faces and gestures, relations between people and work with their feeling of melancholy and haste, pride and passion, but never alienation.
This labyrinth of phrases, objects, posters and works, astonishing us with the infinite variations on the word "Olivetti", takes us forward to the last images of this "bella società", which could not be anything but the faces, renowned and less well-known, of those who played a part on the stage of the cultural, economic and social history in the world, in Italy and in the Canavese region. (Giorgia Gandione)