This is how modernity was voiced in the pages of 'Civilisation of Machines

"In the winter of 1953, when I put the project of 'Civilisation of Machines' into focus, the culture of the West had remained incredibly backward and sceptical towards technique, towards engineering." The person uttering these words was Leonardo Sinisgalli in an interview with Ferdinando Camon in 1965. The magazine, of which he had been the creator with Giuseppe Eugenio Luraghi, continued to come out regularly with that title, but there had been a change in ownership - from Finmeccanica to Iri - and he was now no longer the editor in chief, but Francesco D'Arcais. In spite of this, Sinisgalli continued to consider it his own creation and, in proudly claiming authorship, he emphasised what was new about the title and the spirit that had animated it in the five years under his leadership: bridging the backwardness and scepticism that Italian culture showed towards technology, the great vulnus of our intellectualism. Indeed, that of giving voice to the tale of modernity in its most striking forms - the passage from the civilisation of the earth to the civilisation of machines, in fact - was an original motif from the very first issue and gave a precise direction to the issues of the bimonthly magazine which, while assimilating itself to the house organ typology, aspired to become a sophisticated frontier of polytechnic culture. It had a supremacy to defend within the weighty question of the relationship between humanistic culture and scientific culture, so much debated in those years and with contrasting results; a supremacy to be shared with other publications, no more than three or four: "Rivista Italsider" of 1961, "Il Gatto Selvatico" of 1955, "Pirelli" of 1948, which also originated from the collaboration of the Luraghi-Sinisgalli duo. These initiatives obeyed the logic of 'capitalist restitution', to use an expression by Marco Ferrante (author of Cultura e imprese, un caso italiano, Quodlibet 2025) the banner of a certain industrial bourgeoisie that manifested itself 'in terms of social planning and then in terms of the diffusion of culture and art'. This is still a little-studied phenomenon, but one of great interpretative potential because it would allow us to fatally understand the role of key figures in Italian capitalism such as Gualino, Olivetti, Mattei and Luraghi himself, the true deus ex machina of the Pirelli-Finmeccanica-Alfa Romeo axis, who played a decisive managerial role in the field of company periodicals, from 'Pirelli' to 'Civiltà delle Macchine' to 'Quadrifoglio', founded in 1967. Ferrante identifies the coordinates of the discourse that lie in the fault line between convinced adhesion to the industrial project and reflection on technology, two fundamental elements that make "Civiltà delle Macchine" a sort of decalogue of modernity, at least in the five-year period of Sinisgalli, the most studied season, perhaps the one with the highest rate of problematic robustness, of aesthetic-stylistic novelty and, not least, of wide-ranging influence on the Italian cultural debate. Ferrante's work of reconstruction from the heart of the 1950s leads the reader right up to the present day, accompanying the results of this periodical in the light of the facts that link politics and economics in the period following the change of direction, after 1958, when Sinisgalli was succeeded by D'Arcais, an intellectual belonging to the Christian Democrat left, a party man, which is why the political dimension of ideas acquired a far more relevant space than the traditional confrontation between the 'two cultures'. Less industry, more sociology, in short: this is the result of the second season that lasted until 1979, four times longer than the previous one, but less enthusiastic about the machinist myth and less rooted in the debate on enterprise, economy, work. This was probably a sign of the paradigm shift that took place in Italy in the 1980s in terms of industrial narratives. This is what Ferrante insinuates when analysing the third season of the periodical, which added the adjective 'new' to its title - 'New Civilisation of Machines', from 1983 to 2012 - and which in part continued along the line traced by D'Arcais, albeit with a higher rate of academicity. The rest is recent history and concerns the five-year period 2019-2024, when the periodical, restoring its old name, was reissued by the Leonardo Foundation under the leadership first of Peppino Caldarola, then Antonio Funiciello, and finally Ferrante himself. Perhaps it is precisely the name that preserves the fascination of this publishing venture, and Ferrante is right to wonder whether it 'alluded to the civilisation built on machines? Or to the rate of humanism that machines contemplate? Or to the culture of man in the time of machines?" Now that traditional machines are no more, or rather, have changed their appearance, form, language; now that "the invading digital genius threatens the human dimension", it will be all the more necessary to confront them, whatever they may be, and to understand their meaning even when we realise we have lost it.