Fondazione Dalmine ETS

Fondazione Dalmine ETS promotes Industrial Culture by reaching out to the generations of people who have worked in the company, families who have directly or indirectly experienced the connection with industry, scholars and researchers, visitors and people interested in understanding societal change through the lens of the economic, social and cultural transformations that industry has brought and brings when it is deeply rooted in an area.

The company's assets reflect the activity of a particular producing entity, related to a productive, industrial activity embedded within the business world, connected to the relevant economy. This is a heterogeneous heritage, which poses daily challenges with respect to the treatment of the media and its proper management.

The history of the company is intertwined with the general historical context of the 20th century. The documents in the archives kept by the Dalmine Foundation are a constant testimony to the thread that connects the industry both with its community of reference and with the international historical framework.

After World War I, production grew and the company became a leading player in the Italian steel industry.

In 1906, the year the company was founded, the industrial settlement was located in an area lacking civil buildings and public infrastructure. To meet the needs of the company and its workers, an urban settlement was born and grew up around the industrial plant, which in 1927 became the Municipality of Dalmine. The town was entirely designed, starting in the 1920s, by architect Giovanni Greppi.

Before the outbreak of the Second World War, the company completed the planning of the city by reorganising the downtown area and building the canteen for workers.

From the mid-1920s to the early 1950s, the city grows with the increase in the number of employees and the demands for quality of life and services on which it depends. To experience the city is to relate to the company, even if one is not employed by it.

Fondazione Dalmine ETS also inherits this intangible heritage of relations, preserves it, passes it on and enhances it - like all other sources - so that it can be an element of added value for the community.

After World War II, Dalmine contributed to Italy's technological and industrial development, participating in important projects that saw it involved in the construction of large public works: aqueducts, motorways, oil pipelines, bridge ribs, radio and TV antennas. Dalmine tubes are also used in tubular carpentry for civil construction. In these years, Dalmine opened up to the foreign market and entered the CECA programme.

The archive once again witnesses the changes of the second half of the 20th century and dispenses sources that lead the company to represent its product outside its usual boundaries, creating synergies and interests in a borderless market. Images of trade fairs, visits by heads of state from all over the world, a new focus on technological development and the issues of a changing society.

Dalmine Foundation is among the first supporters of Museimpresa.