Retro Gems

Fiat 600

Some little gems courtesy of Micro Museum:

Empolini Milano (1968)
Benelli delivery vehicle (1967)
Vespa 400 (1957)
Fiat 600 Multipla (1960)

Bianchi: World's Oldest Bike Manufacturer

Established in 1885 by Edouardo Bianchi (died 1946) and noted for its celeste (aqua-blue green color) frames, Bianchi is the world's oldest bicycle manufacurer who invented the front calliper brake. In fact, from the onset Bianchi was an innovative company. They pioneered the use of equal-sized wheels with pneumatic rubber tires the year they were founded. See Bianchi timeline here.

Like most Italian companies that rarely stay put in one area, Bianchi dabbled in motorcycles (1897-1967) and luxury cars (from 1900-1939) as well. However, unlike many Italian companies, Bianchi didn't (at the time on the bicycle side. Now they do provide custom services) specialize rather opting for mass industrial production. By 1915, it was producing 40 000 bicycles, 1500 motorcycles and 1000 cars a year. By the 1940s, the company employed over 4000 workers in two factories.

In 1955, the company returned to car building after a 16-year layoff to produce the Autobianchi in conjunction with Pirelli and Fiat. It was later rebranded into Lancia in 1989.

Bianchi is currently part of Cycleurope of Sweden.

Map Of Italian Dialects

Wilier Triestina And Guerciotti Bikes

Triestina rides to UCI titles

Just a couple of bike manufacturers to complement your Sunday readings. The first is Wilier Triestina founded in 1906 and still finding success and the second Guerciotti founded in 1964.

For Bike Enthusiasts

The 68th Motorcyle and Bicycle exhibition presented by EICMA is taking place in Milan from November 2-7, 2010.

Leather Craftsmanship

There's no such thing as "Italian" or "Spanish" leather. If you have to import the product, it's not indigenous to your culture. The type of leather Italian designers desire and use is not made in Italy. So they import it from all sorts of places. Same goes with "Italian" coffee. Coffee beans are not grown in Italy but in places like Yemen, Africa and Central America.

Italy is a net importer of many things that they turn into their own.

When we say "Italian" espresso or leather, we're talking about the art of turning coffee or leather into something "Italian."

This is where Italians have become masters and it's not different with leather.

Interview With sTrike And Smooth Concept Designer Stefano Marchetto

e-Talian recently had a chance to sit down and interview with industrial designer Stefano Marchetto. Among other things, we talked a little about his to concept designs: sTrike and Smooth car.

Some people interview vampires, I interview industrial designers.

Tell us about yourself. Where you're from and live as well as your education.

I’m from Vicenza, a small city in the North of Italy. I grew up in a big and somewhat futuristic house that stood over a factory. My neighborhood were factories and car showrooms, this is why probably I became so accustomed to industrial aesthetics. I’ve started drawing cars when I was 5 years old, and since my passion never stopped, after high school I decided to join the Industrial Design Faculty at IUAV in Venice.

But my start was disappointing. On the first day the lecturer asked us “what’s your name and why you are here?”I answered “my name is Stefano and I want to design vehicles”, he answered “mmmh, I think you are in the wrong place: there isn’t a transportation design course here!”

At the end of my studies I presented the Smooth car, and with this project I won the “Stile Italiano Giovani 2004”, an international car design competition. Now I live in Milan, I moved to study at Politecnico di Milano.

Who were your main (design) influences - if any?

When I was younger, I was totally concerned about car design: my heroes were Pininfarina, Giugiaro, Bertone. I was strongly attracted by fluid and aerodynamic forms, like the Concorde, sport cars, high speed trains.

What are the main challenges to green car/bike technology in making it accessible, efficient and feasible?

So far, I can see 2 main challenges: technological and cultural. The first one is mainly related to batteries: if you compare the energy density of 1 kg of petrol to 1 kg of the best kind of battery, you will see that there a huge difference. Fuel has a higher specific energy, and it’s cheaper, too. Batteries are heavy, with a relative small capacity, and could be really pollutant when dismissed. A solution to batteries’ problems could be the ultracapacitors: but right now they don’t have enough energy density. There are rumors about high performance ultracapacitors made by a company called Eestor, but so far nothing happened…


The cultural problem is maybe more difficult to solve: we come from one century of cultural domination made by car makers. In the 20th century, cars were a status symbol, values like freedom, power, speed, technology were convoyed over this object, cities and activities were shaped according to their capabilities. This is the cause of the unlivable cities we have now, polluted and with social problems. Developed countries’ citizens have to realize that a car makes sense when you have to travel for 100 km outside from the city, with more than one passenger. Cars are designed for this, using them in an urban area creates only problems. When a critical threshold of responsible consumers will realize this, industry will invest more on alternative solutions, not only green cars and bicycles, but other new kinds of vehicles. This will make green vehicles more affordable.

Why an interest in green technology?

When you are a designer, you have to consider everything you think and make could be produced in millions of copies and sold everywhere. We are now living in a critical historical moment, since big countries like India and China are quickly moving to a capitalistic way of life: they have no more only millions of producers, but also millions of possible consumers. If we don’t evolve the technological and cultural aspects of our industrialized culture, we are taking the lanet ,, and all mankind, to a very dangerous position. Green, or even better sustainable, is the only way to make everything, in my opinion.

How did you come about your design for sTrike. What are the main attributes?

sTrike is the final result of an university course: teachers asked us to redesign an existing trike, the Greenspeed GTR-20. Instead of caring about technical issues, I decided to work on an aerodynamic body, designed to offer weather protection and to be installed over existing trike’s body with minimum modification to the frame. The result is a fluid and light cover that embodies also a small luggage van, and aesthetically transforms the trike from a “really low wheelchair” to a “futuristic vehicle”, something that could be desirable, sustainable and practical too.


What are the main characteristics of the Smooth car?

Smooth is an electric micro car designed to be used in the urban areas: with Smooth 2 passengers, with luggage capacity. It can travel easily inside the city getting direct access to the sidewalk, thanks to the big front door that, when opened, “disappears” inside the car body. In this way, the car can be parked transversally, saving a lot of parking space. Smooth could be considered a redesign of the famous Iso Isetta, a bubblecar designed in Italy by Ermenigildo Preti in 1952.

What has been the reaction to both? Where have they been presented?

Smooth won the “Stile Italiano Giovani 2004" (as mentioned earlier) competition for its styling simplicity and technical innovation. So far, no production is scheduled, simply because actual laws are too restrictive (at least in Italy). sTrike has never be really presented, but received several positive comments from many design blog users.

What are your plans for the future? Will we be seeing more concepts?

My next step is finishing my thesis: I can already say that will be on sustainable and green mobility, so another concept is coming! Then, I’d really like to work in the sustainable mobility area, alone or in a studio. It seems really hard to find this kind of job in Italy, so probably I will move. If you know someone interested to my concepts, let me know!

Are any of Italy's big car/bicycle/motorcycle manufacturers working on their own concept models? Or is this left to the small independents?

Many Italian and international big car/bicycle/motorcycle manufacturers are working on their own concept models. The only problem is they don’t want to produce them now! When you are big, you are interested only in high quantities, and these means you need a mature market. Green mobility is still something new, numbers are small, big ones are not economically interested. But they want to show they have the creative potential to do a different product for a different market. So, if you look for a green vehicle, you will probably find a lot of small independents manufacturers’ products. Things will probably change a lot in the next 5-10 years.

e-Talian thanks Stefano for sharing his thoughts with us!

Old Meet New World

Well the old world may be dead
Our parents can't understand
But I still love my parents
And I still love the old world
Oh, I had a New York girlfriend
And she couldn't understand how I could
Still love my parents and still love the old world

Old World, Jonathan Richman

As I roamed around Amenduni Nicola S.p.A., a company specializing in olive oil processing, I thought about the lyrics above. Yeah, I know. I'm weird.

Still, it's interesting to see an activity dating back centuries like the production of olive oil meet the new world like it does.

It's a little painful reading the English translation of Italian websites but I think we get the gist of what they do. At some point, I imagine, Italian companies and their webistes will have to invest in proper translations.

FIAT Workers: Work Harder

Sergio Marchionne continues his Fiat revolution demanding a stronger work ethic from his employees.

K-Way Motus Drops Out Of X-Prize Competition

Sorry to hear this but once again, the Italians at least are in the discussion when it comes to green car technology.
The K-Way Motus (I keep thinking about my old windbreakers) is a three-wheeled electric car.

Hopefully they'll perservere.

Niccolo Fontana Tartaglia: Forgotten Mathematics Genius

I remember reading years ago about Niccolo Fontana Tartaglia and his work on the trajectory of cannonballs. As it turned out, he ended up being an important firgure in the development of mathematics and engineering.

Read more about this remarkable, albeit forgotten, person here.

Oh before I forget. He was born and died poor.

"In the Renaissance Italy of the early 16th Century, Bologna University in particular was famed for its intense public mathematics competitions. It was in just such a competition, in 1535, that the unlikely figure of the young Tartaglia first revealed a mathematical finding hitherto considered impossible, and which had stumped the best mathematicians of China, India and the Islamic world.


Niccolò Fontana Tartaglia was a poor, self-taught mathematician, often referred to as “The Stammerer” for a speech defect he suffered due to an injury he received in a battle against the invading French army. He was an engineer known for designing fortifications, a surveyor of topography (seeking the best means of defense or offense in battles), and a bookkeeper from the Republic of Venice.

But he was first and foremost a mathematician. He distinguised himself by producing, among other things, the first Italian translations of works by Archimedes and Euclid from uncorrupted Greek texts (for two centuries, Euclid's "Elements" had been taught from two Latin translations taken from an Arabic source, parts of which contained errors making them all but unusable), as well as an acclaimed compilation of mathematics of his own.

Tartaglia's greates legacy to mathematical history, though, occurred when he won the 1535 Bologna University mathematics competition by demonstrating a general algebraic formula for solving cubic equations (equations with terms including x3), something which had come to be seen by this time as an impossibility, requiring as it does an understanding of the square roots of negative numbers. In the competition, he beat Scipione del Ferro, whose had coincidentally produced his own solution to the cubic equation problem. Although del Ferro's solution perhaps predated Tartaglia’s, it was much more limited, and Tartaglia is usually credited with the first general solution."

Lodovico Ferrari, along with Geralamo Cardano, were also an important individual in the development of modern mathematics. Both, incidentally, were engaged in a feud with Tartaglia. From Story of Mathematics:

"Tartaglia’s definitive method was leaked to Gerolamo Cardano, a rather eccentric and confrontational elder mathematician. Cardano published it himself in his 1545 book "Ars Magna" (despite having promised Tartaglia that he would not), along with the work of his own brilliant student Lodovico Ferrari. Ferrari, on seeing Tartaglia's cubic solution, had realized that he could use a similar method to solve quartic equations (equations with terms including x4).


In this work, Tartaglia, Cardano and Ferrari between them demonstrated the first uses of what are now known as complex numbers, combinations of real and imaginary numbers of the type a + bi, where i is the imaginary unit √-1. It fell to another Bologna resident, Rafael Bombelli, to explain, at the end of the 1560's, exactly what imaginary numbers really were and how they could be used.

Although both of the younger men were acknowledged in the foreword of Cardano's book, as well as in several places within its body, Tartgalia engaged Cardano in a decade-long fight over the publication. Cardano argued that, when he happened to see (some years after the 1535 competition) Scipione del Ferro's unpublished independent cubic equation solution, which was dated before Tartaglia's, he decided that his promise to Tartaglia could legitimately be broken, and he included Tartaglia's solution in his next publication, along with Ferrari's quartic solution.

Medical Technology Leads To Robotic Hand

It's certainly a breakthrough for medicine. We're not quite at replacing an entire hand like how it happened for Luke Skywalker but important nonetheless!

Excerpt from Dallas News (link above):

"An Italian who lost his left forearm in a car crash was successfully linked to a robotic hand, allowing him to feel sensations and control the artificial limb with his thoughts, scientists said Wednesday.


During a one-month experiment last year, 26-year-old Pierpaolo Petruzziello said, it felt like his lost arm had grown back again, although the robotic hand was attached to his body only with electrodes.

"It's a matter of mind, of concentration," Petruzziello said. "When you think of it as your hand and forearm, it all becomes easier."

Though similar experiments have been successful before, the scientists who led the project say this was the first time a patient has been able to make such complex movements using his mind to control a biomechanic hand connected to his nervous system.

The Italy-based team said at a news conference Wednesday that it implanted electrodes into the nerves in what remained of Petruzziello's left arm, which was cut off in a crash some three years ago.

The prosthetic was not implanted on the patient, only connected through the electrodes. During the news conference, video was shown of Petruzziello as he concentrated to give orders to the hand placed next to him."

Robots Who Speak La Lingua

Gee, I hope these robots don't swear.

From Italtrade:

"With the development of new technologies, especially digital, it was inevitable that the Italian machine tool and production systems industry, which has been among the world leaders for decades, would begin to assume an increasingly important role on world markets in the robotics field as well.

And today, the Italian robotics sector (www.ucimu.it) is second in the world for value of production and number of devices produced. In some sectors, it is in first place, even ahead of Japan, the historic leader in this very special niche in the great world of instrumental goods. But there's more. Not only is Italy a great manufacturer of this type of machine, it is also a great market, to the extent that it occupies a relative second, and absolute fourth, place in the world ranking of countries that have invested in industrial automation equipment. If Japan currently has about 350,000 robots installed and Germany and the United States about 110,000, Italy has no less than 70,000. And if you calculate the number of robots for every 10,000 workers employed in manufacturing, Italy jumps to second place, with 100 machines for every 10,000 workers, after Germany, which has 130."

Lamborghini Goes Carbon Fiber

Lamborghini is opening a carbon fiber research center.:

"The Gallardo 570-4 Superleggera dropped more than 150 pounds with the use of Resin Transfer Molding (RTM), which is the process Lambo uses to shape the fiber. It sits at just under the magical 3,000-pound mark.

Carbon fiber can be used for more than just the shell of a car, and the Gallardo Spyder's engine cover is the largest carbon-fiber component ever produced by the auto industry."

A Couple Of Kitchen Products Companies From The Motherland

Here in Canada, we have Bertazzoni distributors of Italian engineered kitchen products. Perusing around the site, it's hard not to want a Bertazzoni oven. Is it me or does the Detroit Red Wings logo look like Bertazzoni's? Bertazzoni was founded in 1882. The Red Wings, who have one of the coolest logos in pro sports along with the Chicago Blackhawks, were founded in 1926.
Just saying and digressing.

Fratelli Onofri is another company, albeit a much younger one having been established in the 1950s, reknownd for its products. Although, I don't believe they operate here.

Both specialize in free standing and built-in concepts.

As you can tell and in usual tradition, the websites are sharp looking.

A couple of notes on the images. First, the Amazon ad for Simple Italian Cookery. Apparently, it was the first Italian cookbook published in America and was not written in 1912 by one Antonia Isola but an American living in Rome named Mable Earl McGinnis. It's in the same tradition of Ada Boni's The Talisman Italian Cookbook and serves as the earliest sources of 20th century Italian cook books for a North American audience.

The actual recipes themselves while rustic can be cumbersome in their inexactitudes. If you have the beenfit of a mother who can read and interpret this "a l'occhio' (by eye), then you'll eventually get the hang of it. I don't know why publishers, for later editions, invite reputable chefs to modernize the recipes in terms of their explanations and directions without necessarily compromising the original recipes. Sorta like how modern scholars interpret and translate a great piece of historical book.

If you're a hardcore cook or chef, then you won't care and will want to have it in your library.

The oven pictured above right is a Fratelli Onofri.