
Utopia, Abandoned: The Olivetti Town - ktpsns
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/28/t-magazine/olivetti-typewriters-ivrea-italy.html
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CalChris
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.

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davidw
> 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.

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

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david927
I have been to Ivrea many times for their (highly recommended) annual orange-
throwing festival.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Oranges](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.

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arthurofbabylon
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](https://www.nytimes.com/by/nikil-
saval)

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platz
> 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".

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

~~~
platz
I see.

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pmontra
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/](https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/730/)

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sandworm101
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](https://avp.fandom.com/wiki/Hadley%27s_Hope)

~~~
jacobush
Lovely

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incompatible
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.

~~~
AstralStorm
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.

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peter303
Sounds like future of Mountain View and Google.

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mruts
> 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.

~~~
chacha2
They wouldn't if they received any benefit from that automation.

~~~
mruts
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.

~~~
vintermann
> 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](https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/3487.html)
\- recommended.

