Adriano Olivetti

Adriano Olivetti was born in Ivrea on 11th April 1901, the second child of Camillo Olivetti and Luisa Olivetti Revel.

Adriano was born after Elena (1900) and before Massimo (1902), Silvia (1904), Lalla (1907) and Dino (1912), who was still to be born when this picture was taken.

Having graduated from the Physics and Mathematics Department of the Technical Institute of Cuneo, he volunteered for the 4th Alpine Regiment in April 1918.

"His father, Camillo, was a brilliant man who combined the most daring of imaginations, the perfect technique of a great administrator, and an even bigger heart. The fact that a factory that is now a symbol of industrial civilisation around the globe was built in Ivrea and not elsewhere is due not so much to particular environmental conditions as to the genius of Camillo Olivetti."


Giuseppe Saragat, Memories of Adriano Olivetti.

After graduating from the Polytechnic University of Turin with a degree in Industrial Chemical Engineering, he began his apprenticeship in 1924 as a worker at the typewriter factory founded by his father Camillo in 1908 in Ivrea.

In 1925, he took his first trip to the United States. In almost six months, he visited 105 factories and brought back around 50 books on the scientific organisation of labour.

In May 1927, Adriano married Paola Levi. Their marriage would produce two children, Roberto and Lidia.

Adriano put forward an ambitious and innovative plan to modernise Olivetti's business to his father Camillo.

From the 1930s onwards, he began reorganising the company from both a manufacturing and a commercial standpoint.

The war forced him to go into exile in Switzerland, where he penned a reform plan in which he outlined the ideas that formed the basis of the Community Movement founded by Adriano in 1947.

Through the magazine Comunità (Community), which he founded in 1946, Adriano was able to spread the word about international culture in a way that was unprecedented in post-war Italy.

Although its political efforts saw it gain only one seat in Parliament in 1958, the Community Movement was an example of participatory democracy whose process far outstripped its results.

Adriano Olivetti's work was at its most experimental in its architecture and urban planning, and this forms the unique physical legacy left behind today, not only in Ivrea but also in Matera and Pozzuoli.

Adriano steered Olivetti towards the goals of technological excellence, innovation and an openness to international markets, with a particular focus on industrial design.

He was responsible for the first research into electronics in the Fifties, which would eventually lead to the first PC, the P101, launched on the market in 1965 by his son Roberto.

His commitment to establishing "a new world" was represented by the city of Ivrea, where Adriano was free to govern economic, social, cultural and town planning policies independently.

Ivrea thus became the model for a twentieth-century industrial city and was recognised by UNESCO as a world heritage site on 1st July 2018.

Entrepreneur, architect, town planner, publisher, politician, sociologist, writer, innovator: Adriano Olivetti was one of the brightest lights of the last century.

In New York with his wife Grazia Galletti in the mid-1950s.

With his youngest daughter Laura at his home, Villa Belli Boschi in Ivrea, in 1959.

When he passed away suddenly in 1960, he left behind a company present on all major international markets with around 36,000 employees (more than half based overseas) and an enormously complex cultural, social and political project in which factory and local area are inextricably integrated as part of a harmonious community plan.