Utopia, Abandoned: The Olivetti Town | Hacker News Reader

Utopia, Abandoned: The Olivetti Town

nytimes.com

113 pointsktpsns24 comments

I worked for Olivetti in Ivrea and it was a nice town. However, any town needs jobs and a tax base.

It's set in the Aosta valley. The river which ran through was used as a practice center for a kayaking team. At the time, it wasn't far from winter skiing but I understand global warming has closed most of those resorts.

Northern Italian cooking (Piemontese) was amazing and we had a list of restaurants with notations of who went there (Bill Gates went here, ...).

Ivrea itself had a walking street, Via Palestra. I walked to work, getting an espresso in the morning.

No one was actually from Ivrea. It was a company town. If I wanted the Olivetti operator, I'd dial 6, IIRC. Most people didn't have phones and you'd make appointments. I made appointments to play basketball.

Many if not most people, went home on weekends, or at least often. And everyone left for August. Olivetti drew people from all over Italy. I remember one woman who definitely made it known that she was Roman, went back to Rome on weekends, and was angling somehow to get transferred back to Rome.

Lunch at Olivetti was pretty good by American rather low standards. They served wine at lunch. Then it was an ice cream while watching people play tennis on clay. Of course, Olivetti was a typewriter company and we were working in the factory. I was there for a month before I was allowed to go to lunch on my own because otherwise I'd get lost in the labyrinth.

I haven't been back in long time but but I suppose I was there at the right time.

> Lunch at Olivetti was pretty good by American rather low standards.

I've been to university cafeterias in Italy... and I'm pretty sure you could take the food in there and serve it in a lot of moderately upscale restaurants in the US without anyone batting an eye.

Maybe if they are still independent. Many serve the same sodexho garbage you find in US universities and prisons.

Seconded!

I worked on a SW-project there in the late 1980-ies (Moving the European Parliament from OSI to TCP/IP) and it was a strange and wonderful place indeed.

And yes, very good food, I gained four kg in the first two months :-)

But there were absolutely no doubt anywhere that there were two classes of people: Italians and "Strangero" like me, and God help you if you did not understand Italian...

The sadness of Olivettis passing is somewhat tempered by the fact that Arduino grew from its ashes.

I only hung out with Italians and I was cheap English lessons. The other faction of foreigners, English tech writers, were very offish.

I lived in San Francisco for 25 years and it's hilarious to watch what a self important high school reunion it has become. San Francisco wasn't always this way. I'm very happy for my time in Ivrea. That was quality of life.

Man, you made me want to immediately get into the car and drive there to enjoy Italian reform architecture (and cuisine, of course). Does anybody have a guide or other link to share for classical-modern architecture in nothern Italy (rather than rinascimento which is everywhere)?

You could look for a list of liberty, rationalist and modernist buildings on Wikipedia or elsewhere and start from that.

Tipically the "casa del fascio" buildings are all interesting and present in most major cities. The most famous one is the one in Como, but I like the one in Trento as well, for example. Train stations (e.g. Milano Centrale), central post offices are also often from these periods.

I have been to Ivrea many times for their (highly recommended) annual orange-throwing festival. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Oranges

It's a stunning town, like many in Italy, and it's nice to read more about its Olivetti influence.

This author, Nikil Saval, deserves a spot on your home screen. He is an amazing journalist. Here’s the URL to his stories on NYTimes: https://www.nytimes.com/by/nikil-saval

> The Italian town Ivrea was once a model for workers’ rights and progressive design. Now, it’s both a cautionary tale and evidence of a grand experiment in making labor humane.

The subheading appears to be a mis-characterization of the subsequent paragraphs (company town) that make it sound not at all like an experiment in "progressive design".

I assume they are referring to Olivetti’s reputation for progressive aesthetic design.

I see.

I worked for Olivetti until 1989. Fascinating company and family.

Crespi d'Adda, some 30 km east of Milan, so not very far away from Ivrea, has a similar history. Smaller town tough. It's a UNESCO site.

https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/730/

Ugg... that theater looks like the mining base from Aliens (1986). I don't mean that it is derelict but that the architecture is similar.

https://avp.fandom.com/wiki/Hadley%27s_Hope

Lovely

If it's so unpopular now, can you live there cheaply?

I suppose there are semi-abandoned towns and villages all over non-English speaking Europe which would have cheap accommodation.

The problem is, it's not a town really. There are no services, no rural areas to farm, no cultural life and no society.

It will need a major breath of life to become a town.

Sounds like future of Mountain View and Google.

> His experience led him to the realization that “it was necessary to set man free from this degrading slavery.”

And we currently are doing a really good job at it through automation, and yet, people still complain.

They wouldn't if they received any benefit from that automation.

Of course they do, in the 3rd world country I live in you see construction workers hauling rocks by hand with no shoes on. Certainly seems to me that things have gotten a lot better in America in the last 200 years.

> It is the interaction of productivity and inequality that makes societies vulnerable to idle unemployment. The poor in technologically primitive societies hustle to live. In relatively equal, technologically advanced societies, people create plenty of demand for one another’s services. But when productivity and inequality are combined, we get a highly productive elite that cannot provide adequate employment, and a mass of people who preserve more value by remaining idle and cutting consumption than by attempting low-productivity work.

Steve Randy Waldman wrote a post about "Tradeoffs between inequality and employment", https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/3487.html - recommended.

And everybody is thankful for that, still a different kind of reaction is needed when automation creates huge regions full of unemployed workers and no jobs with comparable skill requirements.

If the perfect cheap robot could take instantly over all human occupations nobody would ever have to work a day in their life.

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