Il lavoro di una vita. Alcune testimonianze su conoscenze e tecniche industriali

The issue number 19 (the last one) of the History of Technology Study Center (Centro di Studio sulla Storia della Tecnica - C.S.S.T., C.N.R.) Publications collects key accounts on the massive work of Giovanni Scagliotti, industrial technician and art, sculpture, painting and photography lover. The "photographic" mark he left in the historical archives of Publifoto (Genoa), screened for cataloguing and study of pictures of some steel plant manufacturing equipment and processes produced by Italimpianti - research within the strategic project Cultural Heritage, subproject Museology and Museography: New methods for managing of photographic archives on the spread of industrial knowledge and technologies - was the opportunity to know, regard, and interview him in the belief that his memories and experiences in a work context supplemented and expanded the largely dispersed "factory documentation" of local leading industries. From these pages you can gather the long, hard and challenging career Scagliotti did in order to gain technical knowledge and a variety of experiences in several industries, even abroad. Even more striking are some successful and extraordinary actions in the interests of production. They turned to be practicable thanks to his high professionalism and skills, deriving from a strong "craft" apprenticeship and allowing you to sense the possibility of a "manual intervention" even on complex and advanced automation systems. From 1950 to 1986, industrial field is actually characterized by radical technological changes that put in crisis the traditional apprenticeship and quickly change "content" and "containers", as well as methods, passing from industrial history to industrial archeology. Some examples of them are the blast-furnace casting at Ilva steel plant, Bagnoli, still practiced in 1953 (fig. 3, p. 34) and the huge press at the disused industrial area of Campi (Genova), since some years a symbol of the complex demolished structures.