The photographic exhibition “A Legacy to the Future” in honor of the sixtieth anniversary of Finmeccanica is comprised of one hundred and seventy images visually linking the company’s present to its past and highlighting its continuity in the evolution of technology and know how.
Created for a broad and culturally diversified public, the exhibition is a visual testimony of Finmeccanica’s and Italy’s industrial history: from steam engines and the forges of the 19th century to electric energy, the car and the airplane of the 20th century up to present-day space missions and new technological frontiers. Huge posters document the shapes of the industrial environment, the technological changes, the organization of work and the path of business culture and its links to social communication.
The images of the exhibition were selected from over 5000 period images found in the substantial archives of both Finmeccanica and the Ansaldo Foundation. A difficult choice given the enormous documentation regarding products, industrial plants, events, people, records, places, brands and industrial chronicles. A choice made possible thanks to the generous contribution of knowledge, information and suggestions from the personnel of the relevant companies; mostly technical experts, but also people belonging to various professional positions at all levels.
Some of them loaned old photographs taken at their work place and kept as personal or family memories. These photographs, of amateur print quality and modestly framed, are invaluable images for the company due to their different conceptual point of view and for this reason, were included in the exhibition.
If you look at the photographs from a chronological point of view, they seem to build one of the “panoramas” so famous in the 19th century and from which Daguerre made his fortune. A vivid and fascinating “panorama” that will spark new interest in Finmeccanica and Italian know how.
