10/31/2026
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=122144282307225751&set=a.122103866361225751&type=3
As a young man in America, he wrote it in a letter home. “So che tutti indistintamente dicono che faccio una bestialità e forse sarà vero, ma io non sono di questo parere.” I know that everyone, without exception, says I am doing something foolish, and maybe it is true. But I do not think so.
His name was Camillo Olivetti. He was born in Ivrea, in Piedmont, on August 13, 1868, into a family of Jewish origin. His father was a small farmer and land broker.
Camillo studied electrical engineering in Turin and graduated in 1891. Then he went to see the world. London first. Then, in 1893, he traveled with his professor, the great physicist Galileo Ferraris, to an electricity congress in Chicago.
He stayed in America for about a year. He visited factories and laboratories. He met Thomas Edison. He taught electrical engineering at Stanford University.
And he came home with an idea.
Back in Ivrea, he started a small company making electrical instruments. But he wanted to build something no one in Italy had ever built. A typewriter.
On October 29, 1908, in Ivrea, he founded the first typewriter factory in Italy. Ing. C. Olivetti & C.
He designed the typewriter himself. He designed the machines to make it. He picked his workers one by one, mostly people from the countryside, and taught them electricity and mechanics.
In 1911, the first Olivetti typewriter, the M1, was shown at the great exhibition in Turin.
The first letter he typed on his new machine was to his wife, Luigia. “Carissima Luigia,” it began. Dearest Luigia.
Camillo was a socialist all his life. He believed a factory should take care of the people who worked in it. Police reports in Ivrea complained that he never missed a chance to spread his ideas among the workers.
Then dark times came. In 1938, Mussolini’s racial laws targeted Italy’s Jews. Camillo was forced to give up ownership, and he handed the presidency of the company to his son, Adriano.
After the armistice of September 1943, with the Germans in control of northern Italy, Camillo, 75 years old, had to leave his home in Ivrea and hide in the hills around Biella. Even then, he kept writing, secretly, about how Italy could be rebuilt after the war.
He died in the hospital in Biella on December 4, 1943.
He was buried in the Jewish cemetery there. It was wartime. It was dangerous. It was raining. And still, a crowd came from all over the Canavese. Among them were the workers who had followed him all his life.
His son Adriano took his father’s ideas even further. Olivetti became one of the most admired companies in the world, famous for its design and for how it treated its people.
Every Italian family has a Camillo. The one who came back from America with a crazy idea. Who everybody said was making a mistake. Who built it anyway, and took care of the people who built it with him.
Tomorrow, it will be 118 years since he founded Olivetti.
Even as a young man, he heard people call his plans foolish. He built his typewriter anyway, in his small hometown, with workers he trained himself. When he died in hiding, those workers walked through the rain to say goodbye.
